To illustrate op's point I'm going to spin up an instance, federate with everyone, and not tell anyone what that instance is.

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.

Thanks for commenting on the issue, I appreciate the communication and it seems the community feels the same.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] can you let us know if you or any admins of lemmy.world took a meeting with meta or representatives of meta?

@[email protected] runs the 6th largest mastodon instance, and fosstodon instance admins (a smaller mastodon instance), were invited to an "off the record" meeting with Meta. The fosstodon admin, Kev, declined the meeting and notified their community about the correspondence going as far as to share screenshots.

In the correspondence, the meta rep said they were reaching out to mastodon admins, so if fosstodon got an invite, logic would figure they'd invite the admin(s) of a larger instance whom also happen to admin the largest lemmy instance in the world (lemmy.world)

I would love if the same level of transparency could occur here on lemmy.world

Were you folks invited, did you take it? I would really appreciate knowing if the people who run this instance have any relationships, formal or otherwise, with meta. A lot of lemmy users are here on the fediverse to escape the reach of companies like Meta when it comes to their social media.

Obviously no one is obligated to defederate from meta/threads when the time comes. But I would like to be informed.

I think it's important to know. I personally would like to know, I would like to make informed decisions on which instance is my home on lemmy - but without all of the info, our decisions aren't fully informed, so I have low confidence making any decision at this point.

Finally, I've posed similar questions before and have been accused by other users of wanting to attack lemmy admins if they did take a meeting, or for any reason at all. That could not be further from the truth. Online harassment is harassment, and is illegal in many jurisdictions. I don't wish any harm or ill towards anyone, including those who have different values or opinions than mine. Finally, I've always been cordial in my submissions on lemmy, I don't know what would make anyone think I'd start behaving differently now.

I think these questions are important, and I intend to continue asking them until we have an answer, so that I can make a decision with confidence that I had sufficient information to do so.

I hope that seems as reasonable as I feel it is, though I could be wrong, please feel free to respond with your thoughts. I appreciate the discourse.

Thanks yall.

✅️ is a shopping platform

✅️ has an app ecosystem with a billing api

✅️ high probability that someone who shops online has interacted with a store on the platform

✅️ multiple rounds of layoffs w/ staff stretched thin

✅️ unclear ambitions of being a megaplatform, beyond what it already is

I guess we'll never know, lol

[we are doing it for the] “integrity of information and resources connected to the Clemson network”.

They're not doing it to censor or discourage use. They're doing it because they don't want the software running on their network alongside their network resources.

You can still use tiktok, just not while connected to their network infrastructure.

Thank you, I appreciate that!

That's interesting about mastodon, I'm not exactly surprised, I feel like it's merely a question of when, not if, apparently that time has already passed for mastodon. I have no doubt folks are already capitalizing or attempting to capitalize on lemmy data in some way or another, or at least letting the data fill their bucket while they figure out how to monetize it.

I'd love to take credit but that was midjourney (and all the artists that feed its capabilities.)

I think my prompt was "a logo featuring a mouse holding a magnifying glass"

I've since realized that I should have said lemming instead of mouse, but a dummy like me can only do so much.

Fair point! I was thinking that too, but i settled on the idea that it probably would not stop the folks who would actually do this though

A lemme.world Admin account got hacked, could be that the instance got hacked too, but not sure this is developing afaik

Connect for lemmy has this on Android. Since others are saying it's on the road map for lemmy, I guess its built into the Connect app and doesn't apply when you login via pc/browser but it should help if you're on mobile, works for me.

I totally get what you're saying.

I think there is (unfortunately) value to be mined from packaging the data conveniently, or offering a subscription service to make it trivial to query for anyone without sysadmin or database skills. Or just throw porn ads on it or some shady ad network that doesn't mind being placed on questionable sites.

Those are good practices if you have privacy concerns.

we're just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data

Semi-public. As it stands, only instance admins have access to per-user vote data. Possibly also API users, but I'm not sure the lemmy api has an endpoint for exposing per-user vote data, I believe it just gives you a tally of the up/down votes of posts and comments, but not who made each vote. But most people don't have the skillset to host their own instance and process the data into something meaningful/easy to digest.

You could make the argument that semi-public is basically public, but I think there is some nuance to be explored:

Once a site like open lemmy stats launches, it becomes trivial for any user to query that data, who upvoted what, who downvoted what, when they up/downvoted it, etc.

There's a difference between something being available to people motivated enough to get it vs it reaching critical mass and being trivial to access by anyone with a browser. How the data is ultimately used, whether it is used nefariously or not, is going to be up to the people that access openlemmystats and what they wish to use it for.

Which has me considering an analogy, without expressly intending to make this political, please consider the statement "guns don't kill people, people kill people". "Openlemmystats doesnt harass political dissenters! The people who use it do!". One could argue that openlemmystats wouldn't do anything inherently bad, it's the people who would use it. Just like with guns, there will likely be debate on whether or not the world would be better without openlemmystats or if we should start doing things to make it impossible for openlemmystats-alike sites to exist.

That said, I mostly agree with you, and I appreciate your privacy suggestions/best practices, good stuff!

Edit: for the record, I think "guns don't kill people, people do" is a stupid statement, but I thought it was an interesting analogy. That is to say nothing of my feelings on gun control, I'm just not a fan of distilling complex issues into dismissive one line statements.

I just want a place for everyone to smoke some meats, yknow, real people stuff

That's it, thats the last straw for me. I'm switching instances to threads.net