This is a precise depiction of both Lemmy and Reddit, surprisingly.
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?
Nope, that info stays on the home instance.
No idea. I installed a VPN on my router to get privacy. That’s all I ask.
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.
That was what I was going to say.
That said, if someone detects some sort of data-mining plagiarism bot sucking down everything on an instance, it can be defederated very quickly.
New instances basically suck down everything as the most normal use case. That’s what activitypub is for.
There is script that marks entire fediverse for backfilling
Why would such a bot need to be on a new instance?
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
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.
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Yeah I mean look what instance this was posted on.
Probably they will ban me just for saying that.
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At least we have choices outside of those two, and open logs to peruse
You are partly correct and I’m sure you can see what I mean by that.
I have had a comment of mine removed from .ml for (correctly) indicating that hexbear is not a trustworthy instance.
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💢 AM I BEING DETAINED 💢
DETAINED
Meh… Tha’s pretty much life.
Yea I’m banned from commenting on several instances of Lemmy. Not really sure why. I can view but I cannot participate.
Sh.itjust.works is defederated from some Lemmy instances, could be that?
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!
My problem here is it being mostly left wing people, I am from the left, but I also want people from the other sides to be here as well, or else the whole thing will get one sided.
I don’t care about that so much as the hyper specificity of not only “you have to be on the political left here” but “being to the left isn’t enough, you need to be this far left, and hold these specific views on politics, technology, etc.”.
What does this means?
Why would you actively want evil?
There’s evil in the left, trust me.
yes but right is all evil
There probably are servers that try to be more tolerant or other opinions, but I think social media could be improved by something like in this video. I put a timestamp but TL;DW not just upvote+downvote, yes or no, but more diverse reactions like “partially agree”, “offtopic”, “you have convinced me”, “informative”, “misses the point”, etc.
So not just up and down, but left, right, diagonal and every which way to have a broader spectrum of human reactions instead of a binary one.
Additionally, add a more structured conversation flow depending on the community. A community for questions looks more like quora, a science community could maybe want options to add sources and have them aggregated in a thread, and so on.
I find enough content here. Have you blocked every instance?
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Good for you. At least it’s not enough for me, and for everyone who’s still using Reddit
Yeah, in comparison, that’s for sure. But if they don’t join, they fulfill their own prophecy.
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.
Yeah, Lemmy doesn’t block you from accessing it via a VPN, for one.
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…
Not a code change at all, just a filtering of the traffic from particular ip’s and forwarding it to a different page which is all that reddit is doing as well.
How can you implement Google AdSense banners like that???
I wasn’t talking about good AdSense in this case, just the page you are redirected to if you are coming from one of their marked VPN IP addresses. Unless this has changed since the last time I attempted to go to Reddit with a VPN on. But that’s the behavior I’ve witnessed.
This discussion was about Lemmy and that you could easily implement ads by changing the code, you say you don’t need a code change ? What’s your point?
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.
I used to think like this, but it’s a bit more nuanced./ If you tell people they can’t have any expectation of privacy, it’s essentially telling people of persecuted minorities that they’re not welcome.
Perfect privacy is impossible, but it shouldn’t be trivial to violate someone’s privacy when their membership of such a community is relevant.
Reddit isn’t privacy-safe either.
I’d put less bots/more legitimate users as a benefit of lemmy instead of privacy though.
also a gdpr nightmare
Caretio explain why?
I’m assuming he means because federation, even if you delete something its mirrored on other instances
Sure, but the deletion is also mirrored to the other instances no?
EDIT: I suppose it should be alright if you mention in your privacy policy that if you interact with other instances their privacy policies apply as well.
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Under normal circumstances. But there could be federation issues, or someone could run a custom version that just ignores all deletion requests.
I’m unsure if that’s considered part of the diligence required in Europe.
Edit: does that even apply to public forums such as this? I have always treated it all as if it’s public forever.
it should
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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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It’s shocking how often I think the assholes of Lemmy have hearts in the right place and thus I don’t block them but are otherwise overly committed to specific and weirdly hyper critical takes.
Like they want the discussion/fight but only as long as they win every time even though no one is 100% right about anything. And not everyone needs to know or believe in the same hyper specific thought process they believe in.
It’s shocking how often I think the assholes of Lemmy have hearts in the right place
Zero tolerance policy here. If a person is being needlessly antagonistic or resorting to personal attacks, they get blocked. On reddit it was pointless because the assholes number in the millions, but Lemmy is small enough that it’s made the experience better over time.
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.
Lemmy makes it a bit easier to make competing communities. If enough people get angry at bad mods in a community they will migrate.
This already happened in Reddit, but competing communities had different names, and Lemmy also allows to escape bad admins and sites/instances.
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.
The main problem is, people are not aware of the left path
Well the main problem is that the left path has about a tenth the content.
And also that Redditors are terrified of change.
Correction to my comment, the right road is wider, and is also a giant glue trap
about a tenth the content
I fucking wish.
So many communities simply don’t have alternatives here. But I’m happier with the quality of the communities that do exist. So what if they don’t have spam bots sharing 6-12 month old memes that sometimes make no sense outside the timeframe they were post and users just repeating catch phrases for karma increasing the amount of “content”?
There are like 5 people here to talk about my entire country of 10 million while the Reddit community gets 2000+ every day. Even a karma farmer would help here as long as it’s not a bot and occasionally replies to comments.
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/
Kinda feels like the site isn’t developing much at all tbh. I know mods have been asking for more tools for a while now
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.
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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
my experience is such that people don’t get these sweeping bans for having opinions. They get them for acting like sociopathic aggressive individuals.
And based on what I’m seeing when I check folks’ profiles reiterating the same story… Yep it checks out more often than not. There’s no discourse on the internet when it consists of calling people slurs in a weird barrage of insults. Those are the people who get banned here or there.
Back when Reddit was both good and the only option, we could laugh about being banned from the Trump sub.
Lots of mods on my favourite bits of Reddit left for lemmy, they were replaced by admins and the admins’ friends
It’s easy now to get a site wide ban if you participate in big subs (and a myriad small subs with the same mods) and don’t share the mods’ politics
Is there more privacy though? What you post is public and people can use the api/scrape it soo…
We are free from “intrusive advertisers who tracks every movement, clicks and time spent on each kind of post, comment or whatever”
As well as device fingerprinters
yeah, this is literally a public forum. Everything posted is public. Nothing is private.
That being the case, I would LOVE better search indexing, so I could search Lemmy, then reddit, THEN the rest of the web lol.
I think most people here would take the left path but there might be a selection bias at play
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.
This is the good part of the fediverse too. Search for another instance that is more friendly towards the plight of Palestinians.
They’ve already said they are deliberately on the offensive against Zionists and choose .world because it’s the biggest cesspool of them on Lemmy.
I don’t understand. If a mod from memes.world bans me from a meme community, I can still comment on memes.world from another instance? Or are you saying just go to another community on another instance that has the same kind of content? Because if it’s the latter then Lemmy’s userbase number problem comes into play. Even popular subjects only have like one or two big communities.
The mod will ban your account on !memes@lemmy.world E.g. balderdash9@lemmy.zip
Nothing stops you from using another account on another instance to access the same community, like balderdash10@sh.itjust.works
I don’t think I alluded to anything in my comment though.
I could really go for some mouth numbingly spicy noodles.
Edit: rereading my own comment, I’ve meant that Linkerbaan could have been posting on another community that is not @lemmy.world based. Like technology has multiple communities across multiple instances for example. But it’s been highlighted that they actively post on lemmy.world on purpose. To fight the fight.
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 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.
Me over here just vibing by myself on my own self-hosted instance that I pay out of pocket for. I go find communities I like and subscribe to them, and it’s enough to keep me interested and engaged, without most of the bullshit Reddit has.
Exactly this
Definitely a good route!
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 !worldnews@lemmy.ml that criticized the recent rigged Venezuelan election, complete with citations. Banned for “misinformation”. Sure, you can just go elsewhere, but “better mods” is subjective.
