As for funding, the servers are supported on a donation basis, with no big corporations behind them. This leads to a problem concerning user data and privacy, as there isn’t a single accountable entity behind the network.
Bit of a weird take now, isn’t it?
It’s kind of fair, to be honest, and the “no big corporation” seems more like a pro than a con
Eh, it is a con when there are problems, service problems, bugs, etc…
My instance have had a few of them and for a while our 1 admin was unavailable.
It is difficult or impossible to get it resolve because there is no contact point, nobody hired to fix issues that need immediate triage, etc… which can result in longer outages or bugs on specific instances.
I’m not complaining. This is a fantastic service that is being offered completely free from actual altruistic incentives, unlike corporations. There are a few downsides though.
Definitely, that’s why I always prefer instances with at least two admins, and a Matrix room for status updates
That’s great and all.
But feddit.de just became usable again after more than two weeks of being basically unusable - because the 19.0 and 19.1 releases of Lemmy were buggy and there was no downgrade migration possible on the database. No big corporation would break their product for two weeks like this.
Seems okay at the moment, at least !europe@feddit.de properly federates
Yes, it works now.
Version 19.0 and 19.1 were basically not working at all.
Yeah, true. It seems like that is a pro that greatly overshadows the cons. Like someone else pointed out, it’s just worded weirdly in the article.
Kind of funny how the privacy crowd is big on Lemmy but it skips over the fact that all of its Lemmy data is hosted on the machines of people that have no accountability…
You’re always free to spin up your own server and host it if you’re concerned about the way your data is being handled. Not something you can do with the corporate alternatives
And only post on your own instance and talk with users of your own instance… Might as well just send emails to your friends at that point…
Emails also go to other’s servers.
But you could just host an IRC server.
But as soon as you interact with literally anyone (or anyone interacts with you) your data is still replicated on other servers.
No personally identifiable information or private account information is transmitted between instances. The only thing that is synced is the content of your posts, reports and up- and downvotes. And all of that serves a purpose and is shared willingly.
And the content of private messages.
Your posts are all public and discoverable by web crawlers even if your instance didn’t federate at all. That’s kind of the point of activityPUB
How about private messages which are also unencrypted?
It’s actually not wrong if you look at it in another way.
- Big tech will abuse your data, but it will do within legal constraints, and there is actuall (though weak) accountability of these companies due to the legal system.
- On federated services like Lemmy, instances are hosted by anonymous individuals. Most social media laws don’t apply to them, and their legal accountability is basically zero.
- Lemmy, for example, does not comply with GDPR. There is no legal notice, no privacy contact person, no banner asking whether you are ok with the fact that your data is sent to unknown servers in random nations, no nothing. Private messages aren’t even encrypted, so any admin can read them without issues.
- There is no way to actually delete your data, as the GDPR requires. Deleted posts are only marked as deleted and you can see their plain text content by just pressing the “reply” button in any of the apps. There isn’t any kind of guarantee, that your post will be deleted on other instances. If federation has problems, the post will remain on other instances and is now permanently undeletable by the user.
- There are no moderation standards. Some instances will delete nazi content, some basically require nazi content. And some instance admin might even edit your posts to say something completely different. It’s all possible and in the hands of random people on the internet.
- Hobbyist-run services are much worse when it comes to availability and reliability. If something happens while the admin is on holiday, nothing will get fixed. If the admin runs out of money, doesn’t care anymore or even dies, the instance with all it’s content and users is just gone.
So there are very real risks attached to a hobbyist-run service with no legal accountability and no transparency at all.
We all know the downsides of Big Tech though, so it’s everyone’s personal choice to figure out which disadvantages hurt them personally more.
@squaresinger @LinkOpensChest_wav yes and don’t let people fall for quasi legal privacy policies that lemmy.world & ilk provide #Lemmyworld #accountability #fediverserated
That happens if you don’t have an actual legal team… I am sure they are doing their best, but if you don’t have a lawyer, you can’t do legal texts.
That’s a bit misleading to say like that. Go to the website, scroll to the footer and click on “Legal”. Your instance, feddit.de, has a legal notice, with a privacy contact person, mentioning you can request data erasure, and detailing where your data goes. Mine, lemmy.world, has a number of in depth legal documents attached there.
However, yes, other instances they are federated with might not take it as seriously though, and if all your data is going there too, then that’s a hole in your data privacy.
There are two issues with that:
- The GDPR notice on feddit.de is not GDPR compliant, and the link isn’t even visible on mobile.
- If you request deletion, they can’t guarantee that the data is deleted on federated servers. They can send deletion messages, but federation is constantly not working correctly, other instances can decide themselves whether they do delete stuff, and if an instance is unreachable for a while, the deletion message will be dropped.
Lemmy, or even ActivityPub are designed to be non-GDPR compliant. (Probably not on purpose, but the way it works makes it basically impossible to be GDPR compliant.)
But if I request it there, after its federated everywhere, what happens?
I imagine that this calls for a feature that can erase your data on every other federated server. If the activitypub protocol can send data from one server to another, it should be able to delete it or find a way to disable viewing said data.
Giving servers the ability to delete each others shit would be interesting to watch when an online war breaks out
That already exists. The person who created a post or comment can delete it. But it only works sometimes, since federation is constantly not working correctly.
Key strengths of Lemmy
- Federation
- Tankies
- Star Trek memes
- Star Trek memes community civil war
Computer, can you expand on the last point please
A prominent /c/Risa shitposter accused the mods of transphobia, loudly quit Risa and started their own meme community (and later deleted the comments after any evidence of transphobia failed to materialize).
Around the same time, a Risa mod removed some particularly low-effort posts despite Risa having “no rules”, which upset some users and so they fled to the other guys’ meme community.
Now there are two Star Trek themed meme communities.
A prominent /c/Risa shitposter
This isn’t reddit, you can name names.
THE prominent shitposter
I’m so glad I finally got into Lemmy. Reddit was destroyed on July 1st but I couldn’t get into Lemmy until November because the instances were so fickle.
In the meantime I tried saidit but quickly discerned that most of the users there were just really bad Reddit rejects. like the worst of the worst Reddit rejects.
Glad Lemmy finally let me in.
Reddit was going down hill long before the API paywall. That was certainly the final nail.
I’d say the first nail in the coffin was when they fired Victoria.
The final nail will be when they eventually kill old.reddit.
