First of all I am super happy that such alternative exists but it’s far from perfect due to many reasons and this is why I think it’s not ready yet to absorb the influx of reddit users because many of them will just bounce off when they realize it.
My biggest gripes so far:
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Users are unable to block whole instances hence you either need to register with instance that already blocks unwanted instances (which is not perfect because it might block also those that you don’t want to be blocked) or you need to block manually every single community there or you will be exposed to lemmygrad or other tankie instances. That’s so basic feature I can’t find any logical reasons that was not a thing since day 1.
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Lemmy is one of the least privacy friendly (unless you just use throwaways and disposable mail like you should) service I have ever stumbled upon and while it’s partially due to how federation works it’s just a fact that even reddit did that better because it was way easier to nuke your account and all traces (including nicknames in deleted comments, which is not a case on lemmy).
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There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance (which somehow is possible on Mastodon), so you basically have to trust that your instance won’t disappear overnight. Obviously any site can disappear, centralized or not but there are bigger chances that some random Joe will decide to close instance without saying anything than reddit closing down overnight without letting you copy your stuff. That’s even more annyoing if you consider that instance admin can restrict you from viewing instances they don’t like, hence you would need to create account on another instance and resubscribe to anything manually which is far from perfect.
What are your views on that for the time being?
The first and third are just features that will almost certainly come eventually. No worries.
The second strikes me as a really strange expection for public social media. Social media is inherently not at all private. These are all public comments and posts intended for everyone in the world to read. If you have something you don’t want to be public, any social media is the last place to post it.
To be clear, we’re talking about the ability to easily hide one’s own past comments from the public record.
I think that comes up as a “privacy feature” because people want to be able to “clean up” their image after changing their worldview, growing up, or getting into a riskier life situation.
For instance, imagine a person who’s a schoolteacher in Florida today, who did a drag performance when they were in college; and (back then) proudly published videos of that performance online. That person might want to remove records of that performance from their easily-searchable online history; because their position as a Florida schoolteacher exposes them to threats of violence & discrimination that they didn’t fear when they were in college.
But yeah, that sort of feature isn’t easily compatible with federation, because federation means that your published words are automatically replicated to servers under lots of different people’s control. There is no single central historical record that can be easily censored.
I never thought of the right to be forgotten aspart of the right to privacy. They always seemed separate.
But technically federating a deletion shouldn’t be more complicated than federating an addition. It would make sense to have the option when deleting an account to nuke all posts as well. It might not be perfect if an instance is defederated in between, but it should be pretty good.
But technically federating a deletion shouldn’t be more complicated than federating an addition.
Of the elder federated services, Usenet supports “cancel” and “supersede” messages, intended to allow a user to retract a post. But the authentication was crap in the '90s, leading to a problem with forged cancel messages, which were readily abused by bad folks. So news server admins had to figure out under what conditions to process a cancel.
Also, instances can go offline and come back later. I haven’t read the code yet, but I’d be surprised if rejoining the federation reliably backfills all the deletions that have ever happened.
Humans have an inherent right to be forgotten/right to erasure barring certain exceptions, such as celebrity or public office or notoriety. As such, you should be able to scrub as much of your data and comments as possible. It’s definitely something that will need to be solved in federation eventually.
Users are unable to block whole instances
Sounds like a good feature, though not exactly a ‘disadvantage’, without a comparison. Is the comparison Mastodon? Reddit?
Lemmy is one of the least privacy friendly service I have ever stumbled upon
Could you expand on this? Is it just the deletion problem?
There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance (which somehow is possible on Mastodon),
This took a while to get on Mastodon. Remember, the data’s not necessarily stored in a usable format (users don’t want a load of postgres in their download), and the devs need to be sure that nobody else’s data will accidentally get in there.
Sounds like a good feature, though not exactly a ‘disadvantage’, without a comparison. Is the comparison Mastodon? Reddit?
This is definitely a disadvantage in comparison to Mastodon imo. For example, there’s no reason for a general-purpose instance to defederate from lemmynsfw.com, but it would be nice if I could browse all and not have it be half porn without hiding all nsfw posts in general.
The features sound good, and judging by Lemmy, I imagine they’re coming, depending on how much free time the devs have.
there’s no reason for a general-purpose instance to defederate from lemmynsfw.com
This one’s trickier. The mods have mentioned both moderation and legal difficulties with nsfw instances. If something illegal’s posted, then whoever has the server would (verifiably) have a copy of that image and has been (verifiably) distributing it. Reddit probably managed to skirt these issues by a) being early, when the world was new, and laws were weak, and b) having the money for a legal team.
I wouldn’t want to be an admin trying to answer legal questions.
- blocking instances: There is an issue on github, https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397
- privacy: yeah that’s one downside, can’t argue with that
- migrating: a few issues on github
In my limited experience over the past couple of days, I have not found myself wanting to block entire instances. What I did instead was subscribe to communities of interest to me and set my profile to show only those. It’s interesting that people seem to get very worked up over which instances are evil…or something? At the end of the day, they’re just servers right? Or am I missing something? I wouldn’t make my home at a disreputable instance, but would still subscribe to a community if it has a good vibe. Is this a mistake?
The subscribing process itself does seem rather awkward. Why there can’t simply be a subscribe button and you have to do that whole search for !community@wherever dance is unclear to me.
More to the point, it is open source and running it involves different instances. If the original programmers become too problematic, it will get forked. Plenty of people run their own instances and could block the .ml instance if they want. That’s the intended nature of being open like it is.
I get your point and I usually do it the same way, however it’s way easier to discover new and cool communities you didn’t know before when you browse all instances. That’s where having ability to ban lemmygrad and some other NSFW instances would help a lot. It should be user who decides.
Users are unable to block whole instances
Much needed.
Keep in mind Lemmy is version 0 point 17. Blocking individual communities has seemingly been prioritized and I agree. I’ve not seen a single instance exclusively filled with communities I’ve felt I needed avoid, but every single instance has a few communities I’d want to block if it got federated to my home server.
There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance
Also much needed.
Keep in mind Lemmy is vers… Well, you know how it goes. I’m somewhat expecting both instance blocking and user migration to be sorted out down the line or by forks.
