What’s stopping me from doing this? Here we go:
I’m going to start an instance and federate with everyone who will allow it, which is most instances including this one, I believe.
Then I’m going to feed all that data into my new website, called Open Lemmy Stats, where anyone can query the user data ive accumulated. The homepage will be ripe with insights, leaderboards and all kinds of data on prolific users.
Additionally, I’ll display a snapshot/profile of a random user by feeding that users data to GPT4 to make inferences about the user’s political affiliations and display the results.
Worst of all, I’m not going to out my instance for everyone to know it as the one to defederate. In fact, I’m spinning up a few instances that will host innocuous communities that I plan to mod and support to give my instances cover for their true purpose: redundant fediverse datastreams for my site, Open Lemmy Stats.
I’ll also have a store where anyone can buy my collected fediverse data for a handsome sum.
Just kidding I’m not doing any of this. But someone absolutely will or already is working on it. They’ll make a good bit of money too, I’d bet.
This is inspired by a recent post on youshouldknow@lemmy.world where someone highlighted what kind of data instance admins have access to, even for users not on their instance.
I wanted to share this to start a discussion that I find interesting. I’m interested in your thoughts, or to hear more on why this may or may not be possible and if it is, maybe some ideas how to fix that? because obviously such a site would be problematic, but no doubt popular for oh so many reasons.
Edit: typo, I called admins adminis. Corrected.
Edit 2: wanted to credit the post I was referencing from YSK, here it is - https://lemmy.world/post/1033769
Aw, I was looking forward to seeing my profile and having you save me the trouble of compiling some of that data for myself.
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.