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
By seeying most reactions ro your post, I can only think that most lemmy users don’t care about privacy at all. Or, at least, didn’t fully understand the implications.
For myself, I’ve already just assumed this stuff is public. I don’t know why I’d assume it was private, in fact. I have a few different accounts and I use them for different things, but anything I want to keep off the public internet doesn’t go on the public internet, on Lemmy or Reddit or Facebook or anywhere. It’s 2023, I think most people have some understanding of this already. Threatening to out data I already assumed no privacy on is not terribly threatening.
Assuming everything is public, on one hand, can help develop better practices, but, on the other, can lead us to stop fighting for our privacy, so I’m always cautious with it.
About the upvotes/downvotes, they give a lot of information about you, and your pattern can be so unique, that a new account could be identified by it. It can also be used for doxing. Having public votes can also lead to metadrama, just like happens in places like facebook with their like system. And don’t forget that it takes just a small mistake to have your identity leaked, and then you have this data available and tied to your person, exposing your psychological behavior and positions on every theme.
Another thing worth mentioning is the email used to join lemmy. This is basically public, eliminating the expected anonymity from a lot o people (remember, most people aren’t tech-savy enough to create a fake one). In time, bots and trolls will become more common and most instances will probably ban fake or temporary emails, forcing the users to use real ones.
It all might not be a great issue now, when we’re small, but if we expect to grow, I think these things will need to be addressed at some point.
Yeah, I almost want to make it now to drive the point home to those folks. (Edit: emphasis on almost)
Misses the whole point, Open Lemmy Stats probably wouldn’t display your posts (lemmy itself does that), it would display all of the analytical inferences to be made from those posts, votes and other activity, revealing more about you than you intended or even were aware of. Which isn’t readily public in the way some folks are making it out to be, it takes some work to get that data and you need sysadmin/database/programming skills to make it manageable and useful. OpenLemmyStats will let anyone of any skill level query your data that otherwise would require you to be, at a minimum, an instance admin to get to.
I like the idea too, but I’d prefer to wait and see what the official devs think about it, and if adding privacy measures is part of the roadmap. Lemmy is still too new and things are still unstable.