YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private
i.imgur.com
Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...
What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
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Can someone explain why r/privacy is so up in arms about this? Seems fairly obvious that my actions in the public domain are public, but they’re all “Lemmy doesn’t care about your privacy”. Why?
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/144clka/warning_lemmy_federated_reddit_clone_doesnt_care/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
I wouldn't say Lemmy doesn't care about your privacy, but probably they didn't have enough traffic before the death of Reddit to really prioritize it. I myself have security concerns, particularly with the storage of account data on servers that who knows where they are hosted or what the security is. But I would say Lemmy instances are much more likely to be targetted for attacks by malicious hackers than Reddit, because most instances are likely hosted on far less secure machines than Reddit servers.
Not that I don't agree but there is a pretty big citation needed there.
We don't really know how secure Reddit Servers are and their attack surface is likely to be far larger.
You're right that we don't know how secure Reddit servers are. But I would bet that they're more secure than some instances that are hosted on someone's personal home network. My statement wasn't an authoritative fact, but it was a well educated guess based off of real world data.
Reddits servers are under attack all the time, and its amazing that Reddit wasn't down literally every day from attacks. Yes Reddit was successfully hacked before. Probably multiple times we don't kniw about. However, I repeat that the security on whatever network they have their servers on is probably more than the security that average Joe Schmuck has on his Lemmy instance he runs from his house. I would imagine that like any business with server farms that isnt massive like Microsoft, Reddit probably rents servers at a farm. Some Lemmy instance hosters might do this, but I guarantee you that a lot of Lemmy instances are hosted from a home network, which is inherently less secure. The server farms follow rigorous cybersecurity protocols, Joe Schmuck probably left his NetGear router admin password as the default password sonce he bought it 7 years ago and hasnt updated its firmware since.
I'm pretty sure that most lemmy instances run on a VPS, where the only thing you actually have to worry about usually is securing SSH, i.e. only using keys and setting up fail2ban. After that it's only a matter of securing lemmy the software itself, which is a whole other discussion.
Lemmy support is full of people tripping over themselves because they didn’t change the lines in the default docker-compose that the docs explicitly say “You must change this to match your environment”.
“The only thing you actually have to worry about” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
What account data are you referencing?
I mostly mean username and password credentials, primarily the storage and handling of passwords. Most people don't take cybersecurity seriously and use the same username and passwords for every site they log into. Someone steals your Lemmy data, and they can try it on every social media and gain access to everything. Now, I am not one of those people, and my Lemmy account credentials are unique to Lemmy only, but imagine if someone joined and used the same credentials they always do, including for their bank login. There is where the concern is.
Passwords are hashed and salted.
Because they're stupid
Because they've not ever done a data request from Reddit, I imagine. Reddit stores a COLOSSAL amount of information on you. The bits that they are willing to provide are concerning enough; I do wonder what they have that they don't reveal. For example. your ENTIRE history of IP connections seem to be stored (because there's a use for a 3 year old IP record, you know,) all of your chat messages (no way to delete those either,) associated accounts (I am guessing this is "accounts we think are you too, but I don't know...) ...so I'm not sure why Lemmy / Kbin / etc get the hate here.
I think Kbin and Lemmy could be better about disclosure, but there's nothing inherently shady about the way they're set up. Downvotes being revealed, I am torn on. I tend to lean toward private, but I see arguments either way.
Being able to doxx someone for their upvotes without even commenting strongly disincentivises engagement with communities that oppose authoritarian governments and such.
When it’s just between the user and admins of their home instance that’s a feasible level of trust. When it’s available to literally anyone that’s a huge jump.