Something of the sort happened in the news not even a week ago.

https://typeset.io/

Much as I dislike praising AI, I must admit I got some good results using an AI powered search engine for academic articles to find sources for a term paper I’m writing for a seminar class I’m taking for my masters degree.

“I think we’re in an age when nuclear deterrent is actually less effective because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might,” he added. “Where you have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is much greater than people think.”

There’s a moral disparity alright, but it’s not the US who has the moral high ground.

Yes.

The last time I smiled was on August 19th, 1991. I wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence. Every day at exactly noon I have the same meal of an expired Maoist MRE I store in a pit covered in old issues of a revolutionary newspaper. I sleep in a bed made of flags from every failed revolution so that they are never forgotten. In the evenings I stare at a picture of vodka by candlelight, but I do not allow myself to drink because there is nothing to celebrate. Every local org has banned me after I attempted to split it by assassinating the leadership. There is no plumbing in my house I shit in a brass bucket with a picture of Gonzalo and Deng french kissing in the bottom of it. My house is actually an overturned T34 in an abandoned junkyard in Wisconsin. I have a single friend in this world and it is a tapeworm named Bordiga that I met after ingesting spoiled borscht on 9/11 in the ruins of building 7 (I blew it up after finding that a nominally leftist NGO inside of it wasn’t sufficiently anti-imperialist, the attacks on the world trade center were a perfect revolutionary moment for me to enact direct praxis against liberalism). My source of income is various MLM schemes in the former soviet bloc that have been running for so long no one remembers who I am, they just keep sending money. I have not paid taxes since McGovern lost the Democratic nomination for president and my faith in electoralism died more brutally than my childhood dog after it got into an entire jar of tylenol. I own 29 fully automatic rusted kalashnikovs and three crates of ammunition entirely incompatible with them or any other firearms I own. My double PHD in marxist economics and 18th century Swiss philosophy (required to understand Engels) sits over the fireplace of my home, my fireplace is a salvaged drum from a 1950s washing machine that was recalled for locking children inside of it. I chose that washing machine model on purpose because I am anti-natalist. During the latest BLM protests I firebombed a Nikes outlet in the middle of a peaceful candlelit vigil. William F Buckley and I wrote hatemail to one another for 47 years until my final letter gave him an aneurysm. The only water I drink is from puddles. George Lucas and I dropped acid together during an MKULTRA southern baptist summer camp and he went on to write the movie Willow about our time together. The best way to test whether an electrical wire is live is to drool on it and shrimp salad is racist. You can make an IED out of potassium and the instructions are online thanks to Timothy McVey, who was actually a committed antifascist communist slandered by the deep state as part of operation condor. Every time a liberal files a restraining order against me, I carve a mark into the wall. I am running out of walls. When Amerika finally collapses I will be ready to lead the revolution. I am very smart and people like being around me.

I didn’t say otherwise. If anything, considering it’s 4chan we’re talking about, I expect it to be malicious.

The only PII the software itself stores are usernames, bcrypt hashes of passwords, JWT session tokens and, if the admin requires it or the user gives it voluntarily, emails. With this in mind, there are still important caveats to keep in mind.

First, there is no way to verify if a given instance is running a fork that collects more information than the upstream repo, not to mention any logging they might be doing. This is where Lemmy being self-hostable is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if you have the sysadmin knowhow or know someone trustworthy who does, you can setup your own instance that you can be certain doesn’t collect any data you don’t expect it to. On the other hand, there is no way to prevent malicious actors from making compromised instances.

The other important caveat is that all posts and comments are public. Personal information you post in posts and comments can be used to identify you. This is true of all social media, even ones that don’t use usernames such as 4chan and similar chan-like image boards. No amount of software related privacy features can save you from bad opsec.

Glad to see you resolved your issue. I’ll be the first to admit that the UX around languages is unintuitive and janky at the moment.

Your account is on lemmy.ml, which had some downtime the other day to test a beta version of the 0.19.4 release. Unfortunately, there were major performance issues and the admins had to revert to the old version and go back to a backup of the database from before the upgrade.

While I can’t guarantee that’s the cause of your issue, it would explain why users from other instances aren’t having the same problem.

Edit: here’s some more context.