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
Even if it didn’t, that would be trivial for anyone to do with the API. If you’re saying things you don’t want people to know you said, don’t use your name. Posting public, discoverable content is the entire point of Lemmy. Hiding what you’re doing wouldn’t solve the problem.
Hiding what you did would only make people think it’s private, giving a false sense of privacy, as it’s obviously visible via the API, and anyone could fetch your whole profile history anyways. Then we would have posts about: “YSK: Your posts and comment history is not private”
Definitely not trivial, you’d have to crawl every single post and every comment to build up profile data on a person. That’s significantly more effort then just pulling an entire post history from a single API call from a user. You’d also be bound to miss data. But I also think posts should have the option to expire, like auto delete this comment or thread after X amount of time, with the option of leaving things be permanent. Who is it really benefiting by making posts stay indefinitely? Mastodon has that feature and it’d be nice to see on Lemmy.
Auto-deleting posts has the problem of destroying any future benefit. In my opinion, the greatest benefit of Reddit is the ability for the public to find answers to niche questions but sharing discussions. Every single person with a problem for looking for an opinion, doesn’t have to find relevant people to ask anew for an answer.
Again, if someone wants to have a private discussion that people can’t just look up, I question why they would Lemmy at all. Something like Matrix or Signal is far more suited to that goal.
Have you thought maybe people don’t want that? Yeah I don’t care about that, I want my privacy and stuff to auto delete, not to be publicly archived forever.