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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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How does that work? As the admin of the
lemmy.max-p.meyou have access to your server's db which contains a replica of the db of all servers you receive federation from, including detailed per-user upvotes/downvotes? Correct?Yeah pretty much, although not entirely. I only get pushed copies of the intersection between the communities my instance tracks and the victim's, and only from the time my server started federating those. I guess I could make a bot account that subscribes to every possible Lemmy communities so that I do get a copy. I could also patch up the backend to ignore any deletion requests and stash up everyone's deleted posts and even go fetch linked images and store them forever.
It's not really a secret though. Some users in another thread were shocked to learn that kbin does publicly display that information. For example, picking the first post on kbin.social: https://kbin.social/m/tech/t/124303/Bluesky-temporarily-halts-sign-ups-because-so-many-people-are-joining/votes/up
Essentially, it's extremely public, so one's gotta be careful about every single interaction on here.
I only did this for example's sake, I respect people's privacy and have no intention of running a hostile instance. But point being, anyone can rather easily.
Interesting - I had the feeling this was how the federation mechanism worked, I don't see how it could work without sacrificing privacy.
So a "bad" actor could just spin up their own instance, federate with a huge amount of other instances (I don't think other instances have a say in this, except if they explicitly, manually blacklist the "bad" instance?), and start profiling users based on their votes.
The potential for global surveillance is enormous. But I can also see it being useful to detect and fight bot farms, spam, brigading and other bad stuff that has plagued Reddit for quite some time.
Lemmy could do a better job at informing users that basically everything you do here is public (including votes). On Kbin the
/votes/uppage makes it clear at least (I like that even comments have a/votes/uppage).