I came here for the same reasons as most of you and chiefly among them was to escape the corporate embrace of common social media platforms.
But how much trust can we place into Lemmy, Mastodon, and/or other various integrated Fediverse platform instances?
I’m all for open-source and transparency which the devs seem to provide, although providing source code and routinely audited source code are entirely different concepts.
Similarly, the high availability of source code may lead to malicious instances, actors, and/or back-end modifications that would favor specific instances resounding consequence throughout the Fediverse.
So I ask simply: How much faith do you have? (Please provide supporting documentation links supporting your answer because I’m genuinely interested.)
EDIT: I literally removed a semi-colon character ‘:’
What do you mean by “trust”?
Do I trust that vanilla Lemmy code doesn’t contain something nefarious, such as code that detects political positions it doesn’t like and reduces their visibility? Sure. It would be hard to hide something like that.
Do I trust that major servers aren’t secretly running software that manipulates content? Mostly yes. I think it would get noticed since there are lots of vanilla servers to compare behavior to.
Do I trust that all the software is well-designed and bug-free? I write software for a living. No software is bug-free and most of it isn’t well-designed.
Do I trust that everyone who runs a fediverse server isn’t an asshole? Absolutely not. Any jackass can run a server. I run a Mastodon server (on which all users are me).
How can people join your mastodon?
They can be my really close friends or family and ask me for an account, which I would actively discourage (join something well-run like .world) but eventually allow if they really wanted to.
I also choose this guy’s Mastodon server
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This is a social media website. If you don’t trust it, no one is making you use it.
I came here for the same reasons as most of you
Ah, so you’re tired of Reddit’s manipulation of mods and users?
Understood and agreed.
Nobody is making any of us use The Software™, my question concerns your decision. Trust is an entirely separate concept and varies greatly depending on the audience.
BTW, It’s not just Reddit. ;)
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I have quite a lot of faith, but I think the majority of my faith is that whilst you’re right that abuses can happen because some people are cunts, there seems to be a groundswell of willingness to react to that possibility and tackle it.
The relatively recent CSAM attack on .world Communities is a prime example of that. Code was written and systems put into place (not by the lead developers it has to be said but by @db0 and others) to tackle that threat.
You’re pointing at the ugliest corner there is, and yet I’d like to point out that there’s been that kind of attack yesterday and the day before; and the tools and people reacted well enough for it to go unnoticed for most folk on the fediverse.
Similarly, the high availability of source code may lead to malicious instances, actors, and/or back-end modifications that would favor specific instances resounding consequence throughout the Fediverse.
That’s ultimately just the Internet being the Internet.
On the fediverse, any instance shouldn’t blindly trust any other instance for that exact reason. That’s part of the game. Instances share the data over ActivityPub, and it’s up to you to process and make use of that data. That includes spam filtering and whatnot. Some instances have CSAM detection for example.
Every instance that’s subscribed to a user or community gets the full set of data: every vote, from every user, from every instance involved. We have the data, we can analyze it. And that’s what really matters.
It doesn’t matter if there’s rogue instances trying to manipulate votes. Everyone have the data to detect and filter out the noise. Maybe one day it’ll be like E-Mail where the majority of the traffic is spam. But just like E-Mail, we’ll make filters and make it work. If all else fails, there’s always the allowlist method: only see content from sources you trust not be spammy. You can even run AI models on it to filter the data if you want. You have the data, you can do whatever you want with it to make it useful for you.
I have faith in the protocol and its openness, not the software that runs it.
I’m mostly a fan, because I don’t feel like I have to have faith.
If my instance explodes, I’ll make an account on another instance. If the Lemmy devs collectively evaporate (and neither me nor others want to pick up the slack), then I can go to Mastodon or Kbin or whatever.
Individual rogue instances can be defederated. If e.g. Reddit truely disappears over night and Lemmy were to gain mass market appeal, then I can likely find a more isolated instance with a smaller community sharing my interests.
Who cares? If baddies subvert the backend, the worst case scenario is that I get lower quality memes.
I care slightly more about clients. Those run in sandboxes on your phone or browser, so they’re probably fine-ish too.
🤷
Teach me your ways. I want to learn.
