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PSA: You can't delete photos uploaded to Lemmy. So don't (accidentally) upload a nude
(tech.michaelaltfield.net)
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Technology
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I didnt know about that. This is a bit scary to be honest, and the first time I feel a bit taken aback with lemmy
Just assume anything you post here will be scraped by Facebook, Google, Amazon, the CIA and the CCP, regardless of what the Lemmy devs and admins let you do with your data.
It's a public forum. Once you post something there's no guarantee it will ever be gone.
I don’t know if this works on Lemmy, but Reddit used to be like this and a solution was to edit your comment to different text first (something like ‘I like turtles’), wait about a week to allow the new text to be archived, and then delete it.
‘I like turtles’ wasn’t special, but makes it easy to scroll through your comments later when deleting things.
In Lemmy, your username will still show up with deleted comments, but in theory the edited text will replace the original comment you want to delete in archived views. This method doesn’t work with post images, though.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, please.
e: I’ve edited this comment thrice in 2 hours. Can anyone tell, and can you differentiate my 3 edits?
On the front end this still theoretically works, but it's unclear when (if ever) reddit respected it on the back end. They might have an archive of all the text ever put on the site.
Under GDPR you can just send a request for them to send you all of the data that they’ve stored about you on their backend.
I don’t know how their backend works, but as a former db admin, it seems wasteful to maintain that many layers of change for every user. I would certainly do that in a mission-critical system, but for millions of pseudo-anonymous users, many of whom are shitposters, that would be an insane waste of server space.
That may be true, but I would be a bit surprised if there were a change-log like that.
e: keep in mind, systems like this don’t just work like that – you’d have to do extra work to build it that way on purpose. And you’d be doing that extra work, maintenance, and hosting for a user base who aren’t paying you, in a system you’re giving away for free, in Lemmy’s case.
Knowing how comments get changed is immensely interesting data. And if you design a system from the ground up, adding the functionality to save edits in the backend does not take much effort at all.
Sure, and I can see keeping the last edit (which it obviously does), but every edit? That seems ridiculous if only for the hosting costs.
Really? What do you expect is the edit rate on sites like Lemmy and reddit? One in ten comments? I think more like one in 30 or something. That would increase the storage costs by 3% and a small amount of processing power.
Hosting costs are dwarfed by media storage anyway.
If you’re building a system to allow change-log levels of editing, you have to allow for a significant portion of your user base using it, whether or not they do.
That will add fail points and hosting that’s wholly unnecessary to code and maintain, regardless of what percentage you think will use those features.
Have you ever been in charge of distributed large-scale systems like that with millions of users? I have. That would be bonkers.
Hold up, I think we have a discrepancy regarding what we are talking about.
I'm not thinking of anything user facing. The ux would be exactly identical to what is publicly observable on reddit already. I'm talking about the possibility to dump any change to comments or posts into a cold data store for later analysis. We don't have to question or think how many users would make use of it, we can count the fraction of comments with an "edited" label on reddit.
Lemmy and other services built on ActivityPub work by sending content to every server that hosts a user who has subscribed to a community or another user. Those servers could be anything from vanilla Lemmy hosted in a datacenter to an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of ActivityPub running on a jailbroken smart light bulb. Most of them will be online to receive a delete request and will handle it correctly most of the time, but that cannot be guaranteed.
Anything you share to the world that way is out in the world and cannot be reliably rescinded. Discussion groups implemented as email lists used to be popular, and the same was true there, but more so since there isn't a mechanism intended to edit or delete an email message after it is sent. Something similar is true of anything that functions as a public website; a great many things published to the web are available from sites like archive.org, like old forum posts.
!subscribe
People can also screenshot what you post to Facebook. There are no controls for that.
The deletion should federate across almost all instances, but there's no guarantee and also someone will almost certainly one day set up an archive server that just listens to all activity on Lemmy like uneddit used to be for reddit.
That's pretty much how everything on the Internet works, FYI. Lemmy is just upfront about it
I mean you could say the same thing about reddit - anyone could scrape reddit and save comments and stuff, even if you later delete them.
If someone can see something on their computer, they can save it and you won't be able to take it away. I mean... it's just how the internet works.
Ask the MPAA about that.
The difference is that things on Reddit were public because Reddit chose to make them available, while things on Lemmy are public because they have to be in order for the federated protocol to work.
I mean any social media is public - what do you mean reddit chose to make it public? It's not like they could make it private, then you won't see any comments or posts from anyone else or what? Not sure what that even would mean.
Let's use voting on comments as an example:
When a Reddit user votes on a comment, the user's client sends Reddit a message containing the information "User X upvoted Comment Y." That information gets stored in Reddit's database and is used to do things like increment the total number of upvotes (which everybody sees) and color the upvote arrow button orange (which only User X sees). Reddit knows the identities of everybody who upvoted the comment, but the public is only allowed to see the total sum.
When a Lemmy user votes on a comment, the user's client sends their home Lemmy instance a message containing the information "User X upvoted Comment Y," which that instance then forwards to the rest of the Fediverse so that all instances can get updated with the new information. Anybody who subscribes to the protocol (i.e., registers an instance) can read the message. The user's Lemmy client may only expose the total sum of upvotes in its interface, but the whole list of users who upvoted the comment is available to the public as long as they have the right software to read it.
You also know that all votes are technically public and can be viewed by any instance admin that's federated with the server a community is on, right? There's no way to see that in the Lemmy UI at the moment but the data is there on the server.
Actually, they're adding it into the UI for admins. And they're letting mods see to.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2320
Rather than do anything to try and protect this data or obfuscate it in any way, they just decided "fuck it".
And that's frankly worrying. I truly don't think people understand why Reddit didn't let mods see that information. The avenues for abuse here are innumerable.
It's not really possible to have an upvote counter without storing who voted, so your instance admin would always know
There are cryptographic methods to do this, but it’s probably not worth it to implement them for this.
Honestly, not implementing anonymous voting probably helps with preventing brigading, too. Reddit worldnews (around the api debacle began) became a nightmare of downvote bots towards anything that wasn't "Israel = good" in any way, and so many spam articles upvoted to the surface from random, unverified sources.
Edit to add: threat of defederation towards communities allowing or encouraging this behavior would probably be better, though.
Obfuscation is meaningless. It's public info or it's not. In this case it's necessarily public
If there is abuse from a mod or an admin, you go somewhere else - either join another similar community or server or make your own.
Or in the case of abuse from mods, report them to admins (assuming admins are reasonable).
Remember, this isn't reddit. You don't have to live with the mods or admins, you can just stop going to that instance/community and find somewhere else.
Also ultimately being able to view votes is a way to combat abuse, as you can spot people who just down vote someone else constantly.
EDIT: Honestly confused about the down votes, someone would care to elaborate? :)
Anyone with a federated instance can view your votes. Anyone on Kbin can view your votes. There's nothing "abusive" about viewing votes. It's not private information.
Edit: Example... I'm an admin on my own instance...
I fully agree with you. My comment was just to say what you should do if you see abuse from mods and admins.
The votes are directly visible from Kbin for users as well.
Only upvoting Lemmy users are visible on Kbin, downvoting Lemmy users are not listed.
What type of metadata is on a server attached to posts, comments, votes and such?