Lemmy is way better than Reddit on several fronts. Reddit is a profit-motivated corporation domiciled in a fascist country and their administrative actions reflect that.

“Don’t be dumb” can be interpreted in many ways.

You can accidentally dox yourself anywhere, especially as you build up a large comment history for a person (or LLM) to analyze. You can deduce my age to a pretty narrow range because I’ve written about growing up with modems calling local BBSes. I’ve tried not to write much about my location, but there are probably many clues out there. The totality of my comments may be very good at filtering down who I could possibly be. Similar for anyone else.

One nice thing about Lemmy is that you can make alt accounts on different instances and then limit your community participation accordingly, to choose your own self-doxxing exposure. One account could be great for location-divulging commentary, such as regional politics or the weather involved in your gardening. Another could be great for your porn habits, although lemmynsfw recently went dark.

Reddit has spent a lot of effort building internal tools to correlate your access habits and such so that they can group all of your alts together to try to prevent ban evasion. The Fediverse design makes that much more difficult unless you get colluding instance operators.

Instead of ads here (and their associated surveillance), we have occasional pleas from instance admins to kick in some donations. It’s too bad that we don’t have good anonymous micro transactions yet, but maybe a cryptobro will tell me how easy that is if I would just use their preferred tech. At least you can donate to an instance without disclosing your account (although lemmynsfw was obvious in its purpose).

Lemmy is better, but it’s still public. Don’t be dumb.

Even Reddit had third parties tracking everything, with some of them republishing data. There was a long era where sites like Removeddit let you read deleted and removed posts.

In Lemmy it’s structurally different, but there are still plenty of third parties doing similar stuff. For instance, LemVotes is tracking and republishing everyone’s votes (looks like you’ve recently been on a downvote tear, OP).

I have to assume that by now all of the major and aspiring LLM companies are quietly drinking the full firehose of posts and comments (and ignoring delete messages), and will use the data however they want, indefinitely. That probably includes at least one entity happy to give it to law enforcement.

In other words, it’s all public, deletes are only best effort, and the policies of your instance are mostly irrelevant with respect to other parties retaining your data. There are a few things that only your instance knows, such as your IP addresses, but that’s relatively little comfort.

Don’t be dumb.

Each alias has a configured delivery destination. Aliases that only point externally never reach the main account inbox.

You are limited to replying from the gmail unless you jump through more advanced hoops. Those include telling gmail in its settings that it can “Send mail as” something else, and also giving gmail authorization to send mail for your domain by adding them into your SPF and DKIM records. Those are more complicated than I want to describe here, and it will be complicated to merge both mailbox.org and gmail into them, so if you don’t already know about them, let’s just say yes, you can only reply as the gmail user.

I don’t know about mailbox.org, but with Fastmail I use a combination of explicit aliases and a catchall alias. The catchall and some individuals direct to me, but other individuals go to me and my spouse@gmail, while others go only to spouse@gmail. The per-user fee is about how many distinct mailboxes with different passwords exist in the service, so I’m only paying for one for me, and the aliases are configurable to resend incoming mail externally.

And if you start getting spam at one of your addresses, likely because one of your service providers either sells your info or gets their database stolen, you can tell fastmail to blackhole that one specific address.

???

I don’t think I’m being particularly rude here, but the reason why I’m engaging is that OP didn’t do anything wrong and I’m glad they made the post.

I dislike paywalls and registrationwalls as much as most people, but the overall lemmyverse isn’t large enough to discourage posters who link to interesting on topic content. That is rude.

At the time I’m submitting this one, this post has 77 comments, including a few with OP engaging in replies. There are several distinct healthy discussions that occurred in this post long before you complained that OP didn’t put in enough effort by violating 404’s copyright because you feel entitled to have a low-effort doomscrolling experience. OP isn’t the one hurting the community here.

It’s nuts to me that you can’t see the nuance in the difference between “please don’t [post]” and “maybe copy [the article text] into the post”.

The “maybe” in there is doing a lot of work converting that into a suggested guideline rather than being a hard rule, and a polite request to follow the guideline is appropriate. But the nuance of “don’t post unless” is distinctly discouraging participation, and not appropriate.

Providing the text or an archive link separately may be polite, but your request goes too far. If somebody shares a paywalled link that is on topic for the community, you have several options. You can ignore it and miss out, and be no worse off. You can find an archive copy yourself, and even share it in a comment to receive fake internet points. You can enjoy the discussion in the comments and maybe find other relevant links there. But you’re suggesting that the community is better off with fewer posts and less participation (“please don’t [post] unless”).

The community rules include

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post

That’s a much nicer way of stating a preference to have OPs do the legwork. Please don’t discourage community participation.

That’s awesome, thanks for sharing!

So you’re saying we need to make plans and soldering parties with all of our new friends. That’s a good plan, actually.

I’ve been thinking for a little while that it might be interesting to build on a pair of glasses with a couple IR LEDs at either edge and a battery pack to light them up. I can’t decide if that would be good to wear to a protest because the glare would likely obscure your entire face to cameras, or if it would be a bad idea because you’d stick out immediately on any surveillance.

I wish I could find the ad impression bot fraud article I think I saw on Lemmy recently, but alas. It’s a scammy house of cards.

The victim was very close to grabbing it after it fell out of the incompetent agent’s belt. I have to assume that’s what this quote is all about.

In a genuinely shocking development, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement Friday which said “The officer’s conduct in this video is unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE. Our ICE law enforcement are held to the highest professional standards and this officer is being relieved of current duties as we conduct a full investigation.”

I run a secondary wifi network with “Ads” in its name, whose vlan doesn’t get forced into pihole DNS. It mostly prevents me from having to hear complaints from others in the house, and they barely ever use it.

Perfectly legal for “event security” to deploy facial recognition and watch live movement tracking annotated with real names and possibly other information purchased from a data broker, as long as it’s all done in secret. But illegal to let large numbers of people see the screen (maybe by mirroring it to the jumbotron). What a world.

I will agree that it was still powerful. All of the phone videos would memorialize any real doxxing so it’s maybe just as well that they didn’t do it.

I think it would be better with minor obfuscation like F***e L***e for Firstname Lastname. Something instantly recognizable to the victims/participants but not for the entire audience.

Thanks, I just watched the video linked by @spizzat2@lemmy.zip and I see that now. It’s actually a little disappointing and I’d love to see the same kind of public spectacle on hard mode with real-time doxxing from a commercial backend. That would be far more provocative.

I think the article hugely understated that nuance.

Oh that’s very interesting. I didn’t get that nuance from the article. Do you have a link to more info?

This disturbs me in the best way. I love/hate it.

I wonder how long they can run this before their backend database vendor cuts them off with some flimsy pretext because this kind of thing is bad for business.