How easily can Lemmy be censored?
Being an old grandpa not that adept at tech, I don't know how Lemmy works. I mean, I know it's decentralized and it's supposed to be better than reddit, but still, how vulnerable is this platform from censors looking to block anything in here?
Are we invincible like those thepiratebay.org instances which jump up the more you try to censor them or are we basically like reddit. In other words, can I reliably access lemmy in China?
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A close cousin of Lemmy is Mastodon. If you consider Lemmy a federated version of Reddit, then Mastodon is a federated version of Twitter.
The largest Mastodon server is probably Truth Social, on which former president Trump posts his messages after being banned from Twitter.
Truth Social uses the same protocol as Mastodon of Lemmy: ActivityPub. The difference: the Truth Social administrators blocked the Truth Social server from sending out messages to or receiving messages from other servers. So it's a private Mastodon.
Bottom line: if you run your own Lemmy server you can block whatever server you want or none at all. And others can block your server if they want. If you create ab account at somebody else's Lemmy server, the administrator can decide to block other Lemmy servers.
If you use a Mastodon account, it's very easy to migrate to another server including your followers. Lemmy accounts do not appear to offer that functionality (yet?), but I expect a migration tool will be created in the future. So if an administrator decides to block another Lemmy server, but you don't like that, you might easily move to another server. As of yet, you can't however and need to create an account on another Lemmy server.
As of yesterday, the largest is of course Threads. Not sure if it’s actually mastodon, I assume not, but it does use ActivityPub and is part of the fediverse.
Or maybe not as a lot of people have pointed out that it isn’t actually federated with anything yet, so maybe it isn’t activitypub.
And, of course, it is (or will soon be) defederated by much of the Fediverse since we want nothing to do with Meta/Facebook.
I pre-emptively defederated it from my instance.
We'll have to wait and see what actually happens. People went and signed NDAs with Meta. It's up to the instance owners ultimately, and the big ones will inevitably start a cascading effect one way or the other.
My gut tells me we're gonna see federation with Meta
I mean maybe. Part of the beauty of this is that I also get to consume Threads content without being subject to any of their data collection outside of what I post and interact with. I can consume their content, they of course can consume mine, but they can’t actually track what I consume.
I am skeptical about this. Not confronting your point nor offering a refutation but I am concerned about Meta collecting data on threads their users are participating in which may include user's messages outside of their instances. I don't know if this is a real potential or not, privacy experts may be able to weigh-in better but Meta's track record concerns me.
A bit off topic ,but fun fact: I read that any site that uses Facebook analytics gets user data harvested. so even though you have no accounts with any meta products, you are, in theory, vulnerable to Meta data harvesting.
No question they’re scumny. But because I’m not browsing their instance logged into their platform, they can’t see what i grab. Maybe they can fingerprint requests my client makes to load images, but the text of posts is going to be grabbed from the federated instance I’m logged into.
They won’t inherently be able to tell me from any other lemmy.world user I don’t think.
Of course anything I post that goes over there as part of federation will be tagged to my user, but they won’t be able to track me across the entire internet from that the way they can if I were logged into their service.
I don’t know the exact privacy implications but I do know that I haven’t accepted their privacy policy which certainly limits what they can do (because they haven’t gotten me to agree that they can do anything they want).
Ah that makes more sense. Thanks!
Threads does not use activitypub yet.
Oh interesting, I thought I had read that it did.
Threads isn't anything yet. It might use ActivityPub under the covers but we don't know because they've not attempted to connect to anything else yet.
Oh interesting. I thought it was.
Supposedly it might be in the future, we don't really know