Sorry you had such a wild experience. I had to comment though because the “from” address looked familiar… Steam Deck, perhaps? 😄 I wanna say mine took 6-7 days to get to me. Well worth the wait though! Really hope everything turns out okay and you get it sooner than later.
I’m interested in seeing how the enshittification of Threads will unfold. It’s all super neat and cozy right now with a clean UI, no ads, not many sign up nags, and such. When they build up their userbase, we’ll see how the platform devolves.
I said in a different thread but: It’s a good, and very scary, reading but I would argue that it does not directly translate here because Lemmy / Kbin and Reddit are not social media per se, they are content focused instead of being person focus. Here no one cares who you are, we are all here for content. The XMPP EEE succeeded because once defederated people were not able to talk to their friends, defederating Threads would cut us off from strangers and their content, it’s not a big deal.
We’ll see what happens, hopefully the Fediverse will not be another free social media attempt killed by greedy corporates.
Well, we have our ace in the hole! When people get sick of being advertised at, move them to the Mastodon client, or Jerboa, or Artemis - no ads, no tracking (unless you keep using Meta’s servers).
There’s FSR2 which is similar to DLSS without frame gen They’re also developing FSR3 which will apparently give “up to a 2x increase” of frames by also using frame gen.
A pro of FSR is that it’s open source so it’s easier for developers to put it in their games themselves.
I was thinking yay that sounds like an awesome data visualization platform, that would be great. Until I got to the “just kidding” part.
You are right, all this information is readily available. And we would be really naive if we think that no one is collecting this yet.
You, or someone else, should build this, such that it is clearly visible for everyone what data is available. And not just visible to the select few who builds their own closed data mining systems.
This would be a pretty bad idea. Not only are companies going to steal all the data from that site, but its going to lead to people going through every user’s history to block people who don’t have the same “color politics” as them. Its going to lead to hyper echo chambers, even worse than other social platforms.
I think it would be better if this data is obfusicated even from instance admins. Does this present a bigger challenge in identifying malicious users? Probably, yes. However, it protects the Fediverse first and foremost from the vampire companies stealing consumer data, and protects the Fediverse from becoming the loudest echo chamber on the planet.
Differing opinions, viewpoints, and politics are important to genuine discussion. These “color politics” don’t have to even be part of the discussion to influence what people say. I don’t know about you, but being in a thread where people only ever agree with me and offer no alternative ideas is not a place I want to spend a lot of time in. Because who knows, maybe my ideas are wrong, and I might (shudder), change my mind.
Hey, I completely agree with you, in that the most interesting discussions are among groups where I don’t agree with everyone. This is where I learn and grow as a person.
But in saying that, aren’t you also saying that some people, like you and me, would not use such a database to filter out the users we do not agree with?
And would it not be a logical conclusion to make, that people who likes to build and stay in their echo chambers, would not be more inclined to listen to different opinions just because they don’t have a more efficient tool to sort out people they disagree with?
What I am saying is, all information that is technically available will be collected and analysed. Better make a public and open platform showing everything, such that everyone can see exactly what can be collected and surmised from the already public information, than to keep users blind from what information they actually leak publically.
Nice play, I already wondered why the page does not load.
So the two biggest issues seem to be:
Voting is public (but invisible to users who are thus oblivious about it)
Post/comment history is public, entirely
I’m not sure if (1) can be changed regarding the ActivityPub protocol, but I would appreciate it. There is at least a communication issue since most users probably expect votes to be anonymous.
A shallow research made me hope something like zk-SNARK could be a solution. Voters must be able to identify themselves (to revoke or change their votes later), but servers must be unable to track individual users across multiple votes. A lesser, but still desirable achievement could be to make it impossible to track individual voting behavior across multiple servers.
Agree to @mojo about (2). It should be possible to restrict how much of my post history others can see. On the other hand, crawlers and scrapers could still gather the data from browsing publicly available posts and comments, and reconstruct individual post histories. This would then resemble (1) again; users expecting some privacy when they actually have not.
I can imagine a hacky way to anonymise voting would be to have a pool of fake user accounts on your instance. When someone on the instance clicks to up/downvote, a random fake account is used to make the vote instead. This would then kind of work like a vote tumbler and keep the voting anonymous but still work with activity pub.
Maybe activitypub is actually a bit crap and we should all be using something better like nostr though?
I’d go the other way: make these things officially public, so people know they are, and then aren’t taken by surprise.
Private voting can be tricky in a federated setting, because I could have a malicious instance that boosts my posts (I can have it with public votes too, but then it’s easier to detect). Truly private posting history is outright impossible, as you said, due to crawlers.
The way to privacy is to make sure not to dox your account, perhaps alternate 2-3 accounts if it’s really important to you.
I am with you. We could just make all the votes public. I don’t see why votes are worse than comments? Or maybe I misunderstood everyone, but ppl talk like it is. It is good to inform everyone so they know. Many needs to learn how to surf the net. Also I think if ppl feel more responsible will they also act with care
Aw, I was looking forward to seeing my profile and having you save me the trouble of compiling some of that data for myself.
I’m not going to out my instance for everyone to know it as the one to defederate.
Should be fairly straightforward to figure out, if I was interested. I'd create an instance of my own and have it present slightly different information to each of the other instances that federate with me, probably creating a different fictional user to send a few votes from to each of them. Then just check to see which of those fictional users shows up in your data and your data-collection instance's identity is revealed.
Good idea! I think as a solution I would run multiple instances and double, triple, or quadruple-verify the data from multiple instances that i run to make sure no one is feeding me fake data. If there are discrepancies I could average the data, or flag the value(s) with a confidence rating and fuzz the numbers to be safe
If an instance fakes too much data and doesn’t match what other instances are reporting I’ll quietly defederate or stay federated but program my system to ignore data from that instance as not to tip anyone off
I guess it'll become a standard feature for every default installation of Lemmy or Kbin to create a random "trap user" (analogous to the fake "trap streets" in maps used to detect whether someone copied them) for each federated partner, then. You'll have no idea which ones are actually paying attention to who's harvesting their data, just that everyone potentially could be.
Personally, as I said, I have no particular qualm with a service like this existing. I'd find it handy and if you really think that you'll be able to sell the data it collects I expect a dozen competitors would spin up immediately to soak up whatever profit potential it had. But I think the advantage lies with those who are trying to spot your "watcher" instances, they're going to have to federate and subscribe with everyone so they'll be pretty prominent in the Fediverse.
I think you'd do much better if you dropped the "muahaha, I'm so evil!" Act and just provided the service. There are plenty of Reddit analogues and nobody cares about them.
I’m fine with short videos, but why do they all need that terrible ui with no seek bar and fewer features than proper videos? I really hate how they don’t have the previously watched ui on them. It makes keeping up with a creator impossible.
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