If Lemmy became popular, what would prevent any three-letter agency from opening a server to get all the user data? (lemy.lol)

submitted 8 months ago by King@lemy.lol to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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[-] april@lemmy.world 90 points 8 months ago

The data is already public, that's how ActivityPub works

[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 18 points 8 months ago

Your account details (email, password hash, IP address) are held only on one instance, but yeah, the rest is shared.

You don't even need to set up a server, you can scrape pretty much anything of value. And they already will have done.

[-] PatMustard@feddit.uk 1 points 8 months ago

I think that some data such as every single upvote and downvote an account makes isn't public but can be viewed by admins

[-] april@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

As far as I understand votes are published as ActivityPub messages, otherwise multiple servers could not have the same vote counts. They need to be able to deduplicate the same vote coming from two different servers.

So everyone can read your votes there's just not an easy UI for it.

this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024

86 points (86.4% liked)

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