Though Lemmy and Mastodon are public sites, and their structures are open-source I guess? (I’m not a programmer/coder), can they really dodge the ability of AI s to collect/track any data everytime they search everywhere on Internet?
Though Lemmy and Mastodon are public sites, and their structures are open-source I guess? (I’m not a programmer/coder), can they really dodge the ability of AI s to collect/track any data everytime they search everywhere on Internet?
They’re a lot more resistant to it than the centralized softwares.
Stuff you post here has some small chance of remaining un-stored-forever. Obviously people can read it and store it, but it’s not systematically indexed and processed like Facebook Reddit etc. Bots go around indexing the big instances, and it’s fairly likely that they’ll hold onto the data. Aside from that it doesn’t get “centralized” anywhere. It might not be a bad idea to delete your comments after a week or two if you care about long term privacy, not that that’s bulletproof, but not a bad idea.
Voting, weirdly enough, is basically public. If you’re upvoting or downvoting things, more or less anyone on the network who’s tech savvy can dig out the information of who voted on what. Subscriptions are also basically public.
“Reading” actions you take on Lemmy sites – searches or viewing things – is probably completely private. The only people who can see it are the individual instance operators, and it’s legitimately unlikely that they’ll ever look at it, much less hold onto the data once the logs get rotated or do anything with it aside from delete it.
So the TL;DR is it’s way better here (mostly because the servers are privately operated by people who at worst, don’t give a shit what you’re doing, and at best would actively want to defend your privacy most likely).
Voting is done through ActivityPub because that’s the only reliable way to do it. If you don’t even require account names, sending a million downvotes or upvotes to a post becomes trivial. ActivityPub votes are signed with account keys so the amount of spam votes is restricted somewhat.
Lemmy 0.19 added a nifty feature to the web UI that allows server admins to see who voted what on comments. Previously, it was possible to extract that data from the database, but now any admin can just click the menu button on a comment and click “votes” for an overview.
This makes a lot of sense for manually verifying things like voting rings or butthurt people who will go through someone’s profile and downvote every comment.
As for reading: Lemmy maintains a read state for posts so its “hide read” feature can do its job. It doesn’t store this information about comments, and for notifications you’ll have to interact with them or manually dismiss them for the read state to get updated in the database.