YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private

Muddybulldog@mylemmy.win to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 2747 points –
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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People can accidentally reveal there identity or post something, notice this is too private edit or delete it. The chance for someone to have seen it in 1 second is low. The chance for a bit to have crawled that thread, with that comment, is higher but still low as it requires infrastructure, that costs money and a little skill to setup. Something someone for a simple plugin won't do.

If anyone can host a Lemmy instance and you just need to filter that one line of code that's for forwarding delete or edit requests, you can just push that info into a separate view. You now just need a plugin that will poll from the instance that's not complying to delete requests and display them to the user. Hell that's something even I could do quickly if I ever feel bored.

Hosting (or simply just using) a crawler takes less resources and skill than hosting Lemmy let alone modify it the way you intend.

Yes, I know, every CS student can program a crawler. I explained in another comment why it's still a huge difference.

Maybe if hosting a Lemmy instance is that hard, it's enough? I don't know.

I found hosting a Lemmy instance pretty easy but I admit I have the experience to readily recognize how fucked the Lemmy docker-compose example is.

No clue whatsoever how to write a crawler.

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