I don’t know why people keep attributing privacy to Lemmy when ActivityPub is anything but.
Is ActivityPub logging which IP I post from? Is ActivityPub monitoring which communities I view? Is ActivityPub blocking me from browsing with my VPN on?
Is ActivityPub logging which IP I post from?
That depends on the implementation.
Is ActivityPub monitoring which communities I view?
That depends on the implementation.
Is ActivityPub blocking me from browsing with my VPN on?
That—believe it or not—depends on the implementation.
We already have an implementation. You me and OP are all on Lemmy. So can you answer these in the context of Lemmy again?
I actually can’t answer them, because I only admin this instance, I don’t run it.
While I’m sure this is not the case, it’s entirely possible that the people who do run this instance are running a fork of it that does all of those things. It couldn’t log your IP address or block your VPN, but it could mine, and your instance could yours. And I haven’t read the Lemmy source code, so I don’t know what even an unmodified Lemmy logs.
(Actually this instance is running a fork right now, or rather a branch: 0.19.6-beta1, because lemmy.ml is the core Lemmy developers’ instance for testing beta code before releasing production versions.)
But you can read the source code and get an understanding of whether it is collecting private information or not. You can theoretically also fork the code and make your own version of Lemmy where you’re ripped out the parts that collect private information. Can you do any of those things with Reddit? Absolutely not. You have no idea what exactly Reddit collects and even if you did you have no control over that collection.
What you’re doing is questioning the privacy aspect without putting in the effort to check if your questioning is valid. Nobody is preventing you from reading the source code. And if you don’t trust anyone else running the instance you can fork Lemmy, make whatever privacy changes you need and host your own instance. That goes beyond the capabilities of the average user but that’s the catch with privacy, if you can’t trust others then you have to learn more to get by without others.
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Many Lemmy instances block VPN posting. You can view, but not vote or post. I have a secondary private VPN I use sometimes for that. But honestly the whole thing just sucks.
I got off lemmy.world because they block VPN connections. Not happening, under any circumstances. I don’t trust anyone that much.
Meanwhile I know lemmy instance that blocks most clearnet connections and can be accessed from tor and i2p
Is your IP passed on to other instances along with your post/comment?
No idea. I installed a VPN on my router to get privacy. That’s all I ask.
Trust them with what though? What are you posting?
Did you just do the “if you don’t have anything to hide, what’s the big deal” move?
I want privacy. That’s all.
I’m just saying that you’re literally making posts and comments specifically to be heard. What’s getting obscured here?
Well, my ISP doesn’t need to know anything about my posts. And the fediverse doesn’t need to know who I am beyond “growingentropy,” so…
Ah yeah that makes sense.
I have a router with a VPN. I’m not disabling that just to post on lemmy.world.
And generally that’s fine. If you’re posting stuff publicly, expect it to be public.
Lemmy gives away for free what Reddit is desperately trying to put up walls on so they can sell it, but I wouldn’t call it “private” because it’s monetized.
Lemmy is the opposite of privacy, and that just makes sense if you 🤔.
Privacy in the sense that no one is selling your information for profit
In terms of privacy reddit has it better(still bad but better than Lemmy) because your content is locked behind a paywall only few companies can access. On the other hand, any one can train their AI on Lemmy posts and access all history of all users freely. The difference is that on lemmy only the companies that collect your data profit, while on reddit also the owners of the platform (reddit itself) profit.
No, it’s just open free for the taking by anyone who decides to spin up their own instance, or to anyone who decides to scrape from an instance frederated with yours without robots.txt set against web scrapers. Hosters could even intentionally break federation to prevent deletions from syncing.
I love lemmy, but privacy is not one of its features.
Any script kiddie can scrape the entirety of Lemmy, with the exception of direct/private messages. robots.txt is merely a request, with no enforcement capability.
The amount of magical thinking around federated protocols both on Lemmy and Mastodon is astounding. Sure, design decisions make a difference, but federations gonna federate.
See, the app won’t track your clicks, views, interests. Only public thing is the thinh you post. Which is great for public communities. Theese are meant to be public. But things facebook or reddit or google does is enough to call lemmy private
better mods
highly instance dependent.
Yea, its just the same exact power hungry mod template as everywhere else.
You can’t unseen the huge one problem that Lemmy has: lack of contents/people
And the community that is here is, amazingly, somehow even worse than Reddit, on average, when it comes to being a hive mind that is wildly intolerant of any disagreement.
I personally disagree, mainly because the interactions have much more depth than the same 30 unfunny comments that people make on reddit ex: this. Don’t get me wrong it happens here as well, just way less. I also see people back claims up with evidence here way more, it’s not always valid evidence but at least an attempt is made more.
The thing I like the best is the lack of self righteousness (ironic I’m making this comment on this post haha) that reddit has, that was my personal biggest complaint there. Like on reddit if there is an animal in a video in any way shape or form you can almost always find someone screeching about animal abuse, even when it is obviously not.
I of course have bias in favor of Lemmy and this is highly dependent on the community. I will admit Lemmy is super left leaning, which I like, but definitely supports your hive mind argument. Even though I lean left I think it would be healthier for Lemmy to have more of a presence from the right. Unfortunately with how the political landscape is today I think it won’t be very achievable but hopefully when we hit the post Trump era divisiveness will ease making coexistence here more achievable.
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That’s a little risky to say on this instance lmao
And boom. It’s gone!
Catch 22. Just gotta start posting content
lemmy now has more content daily than reddit in 2011, we’ll grow.
We’ve already grown faster than reddit
There is substantially less content , but there is content. I don’t get everything I am looking for, but enough to keep me happy
And searching for the said content
lemmy aint that private, and possibly easily scrapable
It’s as private as you make it. It does not have integrated tracking and/or ad trafficking.
Couldn’t it? If an Instance owner so chose?
Of course it COULD but someone has to modify the code. Boost for Lemmy also shows google ads…
As all sites should be. I’m on the internet, mr world wide. When did we expect privacy. Don’t put nothing online you don’t want the world to know.
Reddit isn’t privacy-safe either.
I’d put less bots/more legitimate users as a benefit of lemmy instead of privacy though.
I got banned from world news for being pro Palestinians and the mods wouldn’t even give me an answer as to why I got banned. Then when I kept asking I got a site wide ban for "“harassment”
I got banned from /news for being “antisemitic” because I debunked the fake israeli Rape propaganda and from worldnews for calling out a Zionist mod spreading pro-israel propaganda.
Also took a few temp bans on .world for debunking other Hasbara such as claims about Hamas bases under hospitals in the beginning of the Genocide.
Seems like I wasn’t the only one falsely accused of spreading hate and and calling for violence.
Justifying israel and America committing Genocide = reasonable discussion.
Saying that blocking some ships to inflict economic pressure on the people committing Genocide is okay = terrorism.
Liberals in a nutshell.
It’s simple, look at the skin color of the perpetrators and victims, and do a comparison. Easy!
why stay on world after that, what a shithole
The reason I made my account on .world was because it was the most Zionism infested instance. It was a very intentional choice.
As long as you can debunk the Hasbara without getting banned it’s the best place to change people’s minds. You’d be amazed what .world looked like 9 months ago.
The mods put up with it for a while. But now the elections are coming close and Biden is still committing Genocide the .World mods are stepping up the censorship.
What are you on?
I just recently got banned (I think, never got a response) from the politics sub for reporting another use that called me retarded. It’s legit confusing. I literally reported them because it seemed out of pocket but apparently I said something offensive as well
I’m about ready to that go back to reddit, just using a web browser on my phone. This is place is asking users for a lot and people still don’t seem to understand what a community is. All the pretty words people used when we migrated over was all BS apparently. It’s weird since people clearly put in work but like, where are the mods/admins leading the community? Idk, maybe this stuff’s just too hard for mostly socially-stunted people to manage (including myself, raised on video games and whatnot)
Shortly before I was permabanned I got an intensely hateful PM from someone who created a throwaway account just for that. He claimed that all Arabs are pedos and rapists and Islam is a disease of the mind and Arabs are infected. He glorified the genocide in Gaza because ‘That’s what you get for killing Jews’.
His master account is probably still active and unblemished. He was probably the guy whose reply I gave got me permabanned
Why not try a different instance? .world is by far the worst of the major instances and the most friendly towards transphobia, zionism, fascism, and left-punching.
Idk, it’s honestly all a bit too confusing. I still don’t get how this place works. I just use sync and even then some servers/instances or whatever will say I can’t vote for certain posts/servers - idk, I’m assuming there’s servers that get turned off at night or something
Have a recommendation? I only joined world because it seemed to have the least requirements for joining and was maybe more popular. I remember other instances requiring you answer a bunch of questions to join or something like that
Idk, it’s honestly all a bit too confusing. I still don’t get how this place works. I just use sync and even then some servers/instances or whatever will say I can’t vote for certain posts/servers - idk, I’m assuming there’s servers that get turned off at night or something
“Instances” are like islands. There are other islanders you can interact with, with their own buildings, but people can visit your buildings from other islands. You can’t make another island your “home,” though, and just interact with their buildings. Some islands are on good terms, and some are on bad terms, and block each other.
What this looks like practically, are that you need to pick an instance that passes your vibe check. Scrolling by local on your home instance should be fun and engaging, and scrolling by “all” should show you more stuff you want to see.
Lemmy.world intentionally defederates from the more overtly Leftist instances, as an example, so it skews more right-wing.
Have a recommendation? I only joined world because it seemed to have the least requirements for joining and was maybe more popular. I remember other instances requiring you answer a bunch of questions to join or something like that
Go to this instance explorer, check out interesting instances, and scroll locally, anonymously. See the vibe! If you like the vibe, make an account or apply for one, and start interacting. You don’t have to delete your old account! I have 2, each on different instances, depending on my mood.
That was good info! Thanks
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I got perma IP banned from reddit after engaging a pro Trumper in a debate about what candidate actually gives us any remote chance for legalization. They devolved to trolling. I matche their energy. Guess who’s comments got downvoted to hell (the troll) yet still is allowed to keep their account.
I swear these people act like school staff who prioritize protecting bullies over their victims. I cannot count the number of times I was accused of being uncivil when I decided to match the bullshit of trolls and bullies.
It’s because reddit had a rightwing mod takeover and they really do favor the bullies… like look at all the nazi stuff/subs there. Reddit is compromised
Yea. These people basically get ahead by taking advantage of the decency of others. But once you match their energy, How dare we be so indecent?
That’s OK though. I now know what it takes for them to understand we can’t be fucked with.
I got banned for criticising Israel too
You can’t guarantee better mods, those are volunteers/instance admins/staff of an instance admin and are people. There is nothing inherent to how Lemmy works that ensures that people tasked with moderating aren’t power hungry or in some way a bit of a dick. There was to my understanding, a certain draw to Lemmy over Reddit in that the federated nature means the actions of some power hungry moderator on one instance won’t leave you having no option but to accept their behaviour because you can just migrate to another instance to see and interact with the same content or even spin up your own instance, but that doesn’t make the mods themselves any different and that’s all in theory anyway. In practice there isn’t currently a way to migrate user accounts from one instance to another so if your account is of value to you and you’ve run afoul of some ban happy mod in one community on one instance, then you’ll have to make a whole new account on another instance if you want to circumvent them and interact in that same community again from another instance and in such a case if its identifiably still you, or you want to engage in the original behaviour that incurred their wrath then they’ll just ban you again from your new instance because a different protocol design doesn’t mean different people.
I like that we can escape from site admins. There’s some profound magical thinking going on at lemmy.ml. But I have unsubscribed to all their communities. I haven’t yet blocked it entirely but I could do that too.
Not only that but where do they think 3/4 of the mods went during the great migration and blackout out reddit?
Lemmy dudes. They haven’t gone anywhere lol. Hell, reddit feels even less moderated these days besides the usual stickler subs like /r/anime lmfao.
Reddit still has niches that (unfortunately) exist nowhere else, probably won’t exist anywhere else soon due to the need for foot traffic, and are tolerable as long as old.reddit.com stays up.
And it’s the lesser evil over Discord.
Lemmy is of course 1000x better, but it doesn’t matter if your niche there is a ghost town.
I only lurk on Reddit these days, but if old reddit goes away I’ll be completely done with it.
anything worth value, is 3 > 4 years old, and all those users are “deleted”.
if google and duck duck go stop indexing old.redd, I’ll probably never see it again.
But, at least trying to grow said niches didn’t hurt. I’ve been on lemmy for more than a year and i’ve both created new horror groups and “adopted” abandoned one and, at the very least, now there’s some life there. Nothing amazing, but people post and interact now.
If a group you find interesting is abandoned just start posting there, also, if the mods are gone for more than 9 months, just ask to the instances admins to become the new Moderator, all it took is to send a mail most of the time.
Uh, no. Better mods is bullshit.
The same powertripping happens here and the admins are just as dismissive.
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It is so invigorating to see you remember me.
You were banned for deliberate intellectual dishonesty, which I had clearly predicted in the thread. Shame I forgot to block you as well. Let me take care of that.
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Fight fight fight!
The main problem is, people are not aware of the left path
Is the onboarding experience any better? I remember the initial process of joining Lemmy felt very shady and not user friendly. That can be a massive deterrent for people joining. Then on top of that having to filter out all the communities that are not to my taste.
Overall it was a messy non-user friendly experience, but now that I’m here I’m happy.
I tried to recruit a friend of mine but the moment I tried to explain instances to him, he zoned out. I wouldn’t call it non-user friendly, but it’s not as simple and dumbed down like other social media is.
Also roughly a year ago there have been a couple of articles thrown around on Twitter and certain subreddits which wrote about CP stuff going on on Mastodon. So the Fediverse had some bad press. Which is rich coming from the site that allowed people like Violentacrez to fester.
Instances are great, but are also a problem for onboarding.
Is there a single point of entry for people now? I can imagine there being a website people could go to that asks a few simple questions and sorts (or load balances) people to certain instances. This would of course need some way for people to transfer their accounts in the future should they not be happy with their instance. Additionally each instance would need to have some kind of API call for the single point of entry to create the accounts You could even have a simple survey to gauge people’s interests to help them in the community filtering process and present the mobile apps that are available.
Just some thoughts of course on how it might be possible to improve the users first experience.
You are right. There’s join-lemmy, but the problem is that people often get sent from another site to the join-lemmy site which then wants to send them to another site. Too many refferals not enough seeing content.
Example: start here https://alternativeto.net/software/reddit/
I tried going back to Reddit after a year and a half away. It’s literally unusable now. Got banned from like 5 subs and Reddit within 2 days whereas before my account was 7 years old without a ban. You literally can’t say anything there anymore without offending someone or starting a fight and you’ll get banned right away for any dissent or wrong think. Every mod is ban happy and if you say anything beyond a one word, vanilla answer, you get banned. It’s absolute trash, like I said I made it there for 7 years without a ban, now it’s just frustrating to get banned from every other sub for every other comment. And every post you put up gets taken down right away for one reason or another
I’m currently a public enemy on reddit (as in, they ban every account they find that could possibly be me) because I made a comment stating that Egyptians (I’m egyptian) are not zionists. This was in response to someone saying that Egyptians actually hate palestinians and support israel.
I got permabanned, then they proceeded to permaban every account I made, after the first, the one that lasted the longest (and last) lasted 3 months until It was flagged again for saying “I don’t debate zionists” which reddit considers hate, they removed the 3 day ban I got for that but didn’t remove the permaban the account got for being associated with my old account (used on the same device).
Basically each time I’m banned from a subreddit or temporarily banned from reddit itself my account gets terminated.
All because I don’t support israel.
I refuse to make another one out of principle
Edit: I can’t stop laughing right now.
THEY ACCIDENTALLY UNBANNED ME
Wow. Zionists have banned me from their reddits for not replying fast enough to their bullshit. That is nuts.
I was permabanned for saying that Lebanese people (I am Lebanese) don’t blame Israel for all of Lebanon’s problems… just the problems that they deserve blame for.
Seeing my nearly 13 year old account guy permabanned for that when these people have been getting away with calling for the genocide and bombing of Lebanese children is as chilling as it is infuriating .
Lots of people seem to be reporting permabans for comments involving Israel
All my bans were related to Israel. My first two bans were for stating that Netenyahu needed to be put on trial and hanged for his crimes. The same way Saddam was hanged and many Nazi war criminals were hanged.
They accused me of calling for violence against an individual, and I cannot see their point. If I said I wanted him to be randomly shot or murdered I would, but I wanted him tried and judicially punished. That is not a threat.
And you might wonder why I suddenly am pro-death penalty when I was anti-death penalty for a long time? Because the scale of these crimes and the brazenness is so severe that I realize I have actually seen a crime that IS worthy of capital punished. The soldiers Who took part in the war crimes also need to be sentenced harshly with a minimum of multidecade sentences and if they are released they would he on a strict parole for the remainder of their lives.
And the fun fact is that Netenyahu is continually the genocide in part because if there is another election and he is replaced, he will likely be convicted of major corruption charges within Israel and spend a lot of time in prison anyway…
That sounds comically bad. Like hard to believe bad. Even the slightest mention of anti-Zionist feeling is forbidden now on Reddit?
You better believe it. I had an account for almost 12 years that only got any kind of ban due to anti-zionist criticism I made. The whole affair with Gaza has broken me in ways I cannot describe. But you wouldn’t believe what was the comment I made that got me permabanned .
Some zionists were trolling me on the Lebanon subreddit and accused all Lebanese of blaming our problems 100% on Israel. I only responded that we only blame Israel for what they deserve blame for.
No seriously, that is what got me permabanned. They claimed that that comment was a call for violence against a marginalized group of people.
I am currently personally banned from reddit for a pro palestine comment, not just like an account, they’ve banned my IP and Device IDs, any account I create gets deleted within a few hours, I tried to make one today to test how bad it is…
2 hours, it lasted 2 hours
It’s despicable how they’ve tried to shut down criticism of Israel’s mass murder by dishing out permabans
The situation over there is tough, it’s so zionist it’s starting to feel right wing.
To be fair, half of it is filled with outright fascists, ahem r/Europe cough r/Worldnews
Just the mention of r/worldnews made me quiver .
It’s a fascist’s paradise
Lemmy.world isn’t any better these days, it took the anti-spez but still pro r/worldnews crowd
Lemmy.world is getting there too, though that’s more of an admin/moderator issue than a user issue (for now).
If you posted anything close to your post history here, well…
I always wonder who are the creeps that check out strangers post history. Anyways that’s my point, I’m not like you you’re not like me. I don’t like you either but I don’t want you banned because you offend me.
What’s worse is that if you look at both our histories you’re gonna realize we both hate Trump and conservatives, in a person of color. I’m LGBTQ. but you’re one of those people who just creams themselves on division so you look for it, even among your allies. So to you in not a true Scotsman and therefore you can now look down on me and feel better. When at the end of the day we’re both on the same side, even if we don’t jive.
Lemmy.World is undergoing is bit of a Zionist admin/mods problem.
They seem to admire the reddit r/worldnews model.
Add transphobia to the list, saying “questioning another users stated gender identity as a form of internet clout chasing is transphobic” gets your comment removed.
I got banned from world news because I simply responded to about obviously bullshit comment with ‘nope’. I was fatigued and short on time, but ultimately that was all their false claims deserved.
I’m not sure if mods are a proper criteria when it comes to comparing Lemmy and Reddit. The audience is mostly the same and Lemmy doesn’t automatically make people/mods better or worse.
Also, you forgot one major point: API! I get to use and support my third party app of choice Sync here on Lemmy which was killed off by Reddit.
Yup. I made a comment on [email protected] that criticized the recent rigged Venezuelan election, complete with citations. Banned for “misinformation”. Sure, you can just go elsewhere, but “better mods” is subjective.
There are pros and cons. I use both, because Lemmy on its own just isn’t big enough to replace Reddit. Lemmy has a decent variety of active communities for very broad/mainstream topics, plus technology and left wing politics, reflecting the shared interests of most Lemmy users. But then for any topic that’s more niche and doesn’t have a disproportionally large overlap with the interests of Lemmy users, it kinda falls appart. A lot of the more niche subredddits I participate in have no Lemmy equivalent.
I’m also hesitant to call Lemmy’s moderation better. One thing I’ve noticed with Lemmy mods is that they tend to be far too lenient with off-topic posts. Right now the top post for me on “All” is this post from [email protected]. You might notice that it isn’t a meme in any way shape or form. You might also notice that it was literally posted by a mod from that community. This kind of thing happens a lot, communities on Lemmy are very prone to getting derailed away from their nominal topic.
Are the better mods in the room with us now?
