mainfrog
Expeditionary Force: Match Game
Would Lemmy embrace or allow /r/2ALiberals ? This is a topic I’ve been curious about.
It depends on if the data is suitably anonymized or not. If my data isn’t able to be reconstructed word for word in a way to directly links back to me? I don’t know if I mind that anymore then I’d mind someone reading content I wrote and taking inspiration from that.
On the topic of privacy - how do people feel Lemmy compares to Reddit for privacy? I don’t really like the way Lemmy handles deleted content for example.
I use the following search engines listed by priority:
- Brave
- DuckDuckGo
- Google / Bing
Sometimes the first two just don’t have the right results.
To challenge some of your replies, if those are welcome.
People do actually complain about email, quite often. Spam filters and deliverability are real challenges sometimes. Email also has a lot of gotchas that you can run into - like what happens when you lose control of a domain name? What happens if your email provider shuts down? Who actually owns the email - you or the provider? A lot of email protocol has inherent security and privacy issues too. I don’t know if I’d use email as the leading example. Phone networks or text messages might be a little more straightforward.
I also don’t think it’s entirely true that federation is strictly necessary. Wikimedia seems to run a lot of centralized services with large scale and large community with no federation. Tildes is a valid alternative to both Lemmy instances and Reddit with no federation. If Tildes for example went in a bad direction or became corrupted - it is open source. You could just start a new Tildes using the same source code. It isn’t federated, but does it have to be?
Very few of these things are something that normal everyday email users have to deal with with any regularity, I work in IT and while the windows outlook client does have a lot of issues, no such problems exist if you use gmail, or any of the common email providers, really.
These problems do exist for normal people. If you violate Google terms of service across any Google service for example you will lose access to your @gmail.com account with no recourse. Email services that aren’t run by a megacorp shutdown all the time. In this list of Gmail alternatives posted on Mashable from 2007 over 50% are no longer in business.
With email most people have three options:
- Self hosting
This requires more technical knowledge than the average person has and comes with risks and deliverability issues.
- Use a smaller independent company
You could use service like ProtonMail or Fastmail - but these companies are far more likely to go out of business compared to something like Apple or Google.
- Use a megacorporation
This comes with privacy and control concerns. If you aren’t paying for Gmail - you are being monetized in some other way.
Yes, we could start a new tildes… but without ANY OF THE CONTENT, nobody would switch unless there was a massive reason to, it would take a massive feat of community organization to switch.
From a privacy perspective this sounds like a feature to me, not a bug. I don’t necessarily want my content to live in perpetuity. I regularly delete my Reddit comments and posts after a few weeks. I delete my all my social media accounts entirely every two years. Tildes going down and being replaced with a new instance and fresh content is not a problem for me.
Different values I guess.
Yet nearly everyone has an email, and nobody is suggesting we centralize it, because that would be a significantly worse experience for everyone. All of the issues you complain about would also exist in a centralized instance, especially the “use a megacorporation” one, are you suggesting reddit isn’t a megacorporation?
People are actively migrating to centralized communication platforms away from email. Pretty much every messaging application or chat service with mass adoption at the moment is centralized.
I am not suggesting anything, just saying that I don’t know if email is a great example of federation without issues. I think it’s important to be transparent about the downsides of federation as part of the discussion.
Why on earth do you expect your data to be private on a public forum?
Do you not know about archive.org?
There is a difference between expecting something to be private on the internet, and the application you are using respecting your privacy. Archive.org is not run by Lemmy - it is a third party outside of our ability to control. Lemmy can control how it handles deleted and edited content within it’s system. I don’t like how Lemmy handles deleted content for example. I think a delete should be a delete - it should be gone, or anonymized within Lemmy specifically.
Even on reddit, they EXIST to sell your data, privacy is completely nonexistent on public forums, and it never will be, you’re essentially asking users to trust in a benevolent dictatorship on their data.
I have not made that argument. There is also nothing, as far as I can see, that would prevent the owner of a Lemmy instance (or a fork of the Lemmy software) from doing anything you list here. The software license allows for commercial use and doesn’t seem to include any mandates for how instance maintainers interact with user data.
Matrix is catching on and growing rapidly for a reason. Also, email is still widely used in offices for a reason, have you ever had a job that didn’t send you emails? I haven’t. Have you ever had a job that didn’t utilize emails heavily? I haven’t.
Centralized messaging is used for instant messaging, which is a different usecase than email. I’m sure matrix will overtake the corporate world just like email did, because of the strengths of federation, a company can have an internal messaging client and not have to worry about leaks, and trusting microsoft/whatever company to run their shit well.
Every company I’ve worked with in the past five years is communicating primarily through Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Slack. Email is typically reserved for meeting invites or communication outside of the company. I run a team of software engineers and we probably use email less than once a month outside of accepting or declining meeting invites. I do hope Matrix catches on and continues to grow.
To follow along with this argument though, if companies wanted federation - wouldn’t they run their own email servers internally instead of outsourcing that out to Microsoft or Google? I don’t think I’ve worked with a company in the last decade that ran it’s own mail servers.
You’re right, reddit does the same thing, though. You can host your own lemmy instance, and then you’ll be in control of the data. On any other platform, you have no choice beyond trusting the benevolent dictatorship.
If anything that’s a reason to fight for federation, not a reason to fight against it.
Do you actually control your data if you host your own Lemmy instance? What’s stopping another Lemmy instances from caching, storing, or using the data for it’s own purposes?
Again, I’m not against federation, I’m literally on Lemmy right now. I’m on Mastodon too. I think federation has benefits. It’s important to be honest and transparent about the pros and cons.