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
Nope, it’s an absolute nightmare. The post basically outlines how you could feasibly exploit data across a majority of the Lemmy network without much effort at all.
With a bit more effort you could also link the Lemmy accounts to the users email, as becoming an admin is as simple as hosting your own instance and getting users to join.
Boom you have a business case of profiling people on Lemmy and selling those profiles to advertisers, stalkers and perverts alike.
Indeed! I felt it was important to illustrate this, to Jumpstart discussion and hopefully motivate some talented/passionate devs to start thinking about this. Not that they haven’t, but there’s been a lot of handwaving on lemmy this week when someone brings up the vulnerabilities of the fediverse. I wanted to further illustrate the possibilities.
I’m encouraged by seeing folks like yourself taking the implications seriously (not to say you ever didn’t take it seriously)