• 1 Post
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle






  • I will not ask my fellow lemmy community members to blindly trust me on this.

    I also will not expose my sources.

    I thought it would take a long time for me to be sure enough to make this post. But I’m making it less than three weeks after joining lemmy.

    If you want, you can take a wait and see approach.

    I never wanted to admin an instance, I don’t think I have time for it, but I have enough to convince me that I should.

    I don’t expect blind trust from you guys, because youve proven to be intelligent and diligent in my time here. But for the love of Foss and open, distributed platforms and what WE believe that means, please use your judgment when considering your home instance for lemmy.

    I am almost certain lemmy.world admins will ignore this claim.




  • Thanks for commenting on the issue, I appreciate the communication and it seems the community feels the same.

    @lwadmin@lemmy.world @michelleg@lemmy.world @ruud@lemmy.world can you let us know if you or any admins of lemmy.world took a meeting with meta or representatives of meta?

    @ruud@lemmy.world runs the 6th largest mastodon instance, and fosstodon instance admins (a smaller mastodon instance), were invited to an “off the record” meeting with Meta. The fosstodon admin, Kev, declined the meeting and notified their community about the correspondence going as far as to share screenshots.

    In the correspondence, the meta rep said they were reaching out to mastodon admins, so if fosstodon got an invite, logic would figure they’d invite the admin(s) of a larger instance whom also happen to admin the largest lemmy instance in the world (lemmy.world)

    I would love if the same level of transparency could occur here on lemmy.world

    Were you folks invited, did you take it? I would really appreciate knowing if the people who run this instance have any relationships, formal or otherwise, with meta. A lot of lemmy users are here on the fediverse to escape the reach of companies like Meta when it comes to their social media.

    Obviously no one is obligated to defederate from meta/threads when the time comes. But I would like to be informed.

    I think it’s important to know. I personally would like to know, I would like to make informed decisions on which instance is my home on lemmy - but without all of the info, our decisions aren’t fully informed, so I have low confidence making any decision at this point.

    Finally, I’ve posed similar questions before and have been accused by other users of wanting to attack lemmy admins if they did take a meeting, or for any reason at all. That could not be further from the truth. Online harassment is harassment, and is illegal in many jurisdictions. I don’t wish any harm or ill towards anyone, including those who have different values or opinions than mine. Finally, I’ve always been cordial in my submissions on lemmy, I don’t know what would make anyone think I’d start behaving differently now.

    I think these questions are important, and I intend to continue asking them until we have an answer, so that I can make a decision with confidence that I had sufficient information to do so.

    I hope that seems as reasonable as I feel it is, though I could be wrong, please feel free to respond with your thoughts. I appreciate the discourse.

    Thanks yall.











  • Those are good practices if you have privacy concerns.

    we’re just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data

    Semi-public. As it stands, only instance admins have access to per-user vote data. Possibly also API users, but I’m not sure the lemmy api has an endpoint for exposing per-user vote data, I believe it just gives you a tally of the up/down votes of posts and comments, but not who made each vote. But most people don’t have the skillset to host their own instance and process the data into something meaningful/easy to digest.

    You could make the argument that semi-public is basically public, but I think there is some nuance to be explored:

    Once a site like open lemmy stats launches, it becomes trivial for any user to query that data, who upvoted what, who downvoted what, when they up/downvoted it, etc.

    There’s a difference between something being available to people motivated enough to get it vs it reaching critical mass and being trivial to access by anyone with a browser. How the data is ultimately used, whether it is used nefariously or not, is going to be up to the people that access openlemmystats and what they wish to use it for.

    Which has me considering an analogy, without expressly intending to make this political, please consider the statement “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. “Openlemmystats doesnt harass political dissenters! The people who use it do!”. One could argue that openlemmystats wouldn’t do anything inherently bad, it’s the people who would use it. Just like with guns, there will likely be debate on whether or not the world would be better without openlemmystats or if we should start doing things to make it impossible for openlemmystats-alike sites to exist.

    That said, I mostly agree with you, and I appreciate your privacy suggestions/best practices, good stuff!

    Edit: for the record, I think “guns don’t kill people, people do” is a stupid statement, but I thought it was an interesting analogy. That is to say nothing of my feelings on gun control, I’m just not a fan of distilling complex issues into dismissive one line statements.