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.
What about IP addresses? I see those are logged. Are they available to query?
I would imagine so, right?
If so, ummmmmmmm. That is not ok.
Umm, anything you access on the Internet has to know your IP address, that’s how the Internet works. Whether or not they choose to keep the logs is a different matter.
Ok, sure. But the difference is that I can’t make my own Reddit instance and then see all Reddit users IP addresses.
What is the vetting process of getting an instance federated?
Like if I was an authoritarian henchman, could I make an instance with a community about cats, get federated, then see all the IPs of users calling my boss a pooh bear, on all other instances?
Edit: what about swatting?
Ok, sure. But the difference is that I can’t make my own Reddit instance and then see all Reddit users IP addresses.
There’s no difference, you don’t get IPs of other instances’ users just an id
Like if I was an authoritarian henchman, could I make an instance with a community about cats, get federated, then see all the IPs of users calling my boss a pooh bear, on all other instances
Or you could just buy it from reddit.
what about swatting
Fix your police.
I haven’t looked into it at all but I expect IPs are visible to instance admins. That’s pretty typical of any online platform.
IP Adresse does not really matter. It changes every day or whenever I restart the router.
Your public IP stays the same for long periods of time, is geographically tied, and also associates you to certain ISPs based on your address space. How long does it stay the same? Months - Years potentially depending on the lease set on the IP.
It depends on the ISP, country etc
I’m in France and almost every time our IP changes it’s because my parents changed our internet subscription, or because moved to another place
every website logs ip. The question is whether the admin maintains those logs. However a web server needs your IP so they can route traffic back to you. That IP gets logged so that if something is not working the admin can review the logs and figure out what is going on. Many websites that are privacy focused either turn the logging off or dump the logs fairly quickly. Doing something like that means the admin needs to take steps to create other avenues for troubleshooting that don’t factor user data into the scenario. With smaller projects like instances hosted on lemmy that might not always be feasible for volunteer admins. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are doing anything wrong. Lots of websites maintain logs that include IP addresses.
