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

  • yarn@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    27·
    1 year ago

    That YSK thread from yesterday inspired me to create a new account with an anonymous relay email, instead of my personal email. I’m not sure how much I would’ve actually had to worry about if I kept using my personal email, but I figure it’s better to be safe than sorry.

    I also probably could’ve just changed the email in my first account instead of creating a brand new account, but I don’t really know how data is persisted or anything. That was another case of better to be safe than sorry.

    • Trapping5341@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      This was the first time I personally used a relay email and I’m glad I did. I also made a mastodon account using the same email but I’m curious if I change my mind on that or not. Personally I think you did the right thing just making a whole new account. Chances are you didn’t use the first account long enough for it to matter.

    • bev@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Well nothing is stoping you from doing both. It’s not an issue to get another relay email.