this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 227 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (14 children)

You can't delete any text in comments or posts either - or at least not reliably, as any federated instance could choose to ignore deletions.

You should basically consider what you write or post here public, and probably public for good. But here's the thing - same goes for the entire rest of the Internet as well, basically.

[–] [email protected] 128 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You should generally think similarly about anything you post anywhere on the internet that has open access. If it's viewable anonymously, anyone could save and mirror it.

The only difference is it's almost guaranteed on a federated platform.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago (9 children)

I feel like, after over a decade of smartphones and snapchat and such, a younger generation needs to be thought better what putting content on the Internet means on a fundamental level, and those of us old enough to remember the more open web need to be reminded.

If you don't want everyone to see it, and I mean everyone, then you shouldn't put it online. For all intents and purposes, once you hit send, it's now a part of the internet. You might get lucky and be able to remove it, but that's the exception, not the rule.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If that’s the case then I need to say this: “Penis ass butt cock fart”

[–] [email protected] 56 points 8 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (17 children)

I didnt know about that. This is a bit scary to be honest, and the first time I feel a bit taken aback with lemmy

[–] [email protected] 62 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

You also know that all votes are technically public and can be viewed by any instance admin that's federated with the server a community is on, right? There's no way to see that in the Lemmy UI at the moment but the data is there on the server.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The votes are directly visible from Kbin for users as well.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

There's no way to see that in the Lemmy UI at the moment but the data is there on the server.

Actually, they're adding it into the UI for admins. And they're letting mods see to.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2320

Rather than do anything to try and protect this data or obfuscate it in any way, they just decided "fuck it".

And that's frankly worrying. I truly don't think people understand why Reddit didn't let mods see that information. The avenues for abuse here are innumerable.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I mean you could say the same thing about reddit - anyone could scrape reddit and save comments and stuff, even if you later delete them.

If someone can see something on their computer, they can save it and you won't be able to take it away. I mean... it's just how the internet works.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago

The deletion should federate across almost all instances, but there's no guarantee and also someone will almost certainly one day set up an archive server that just listens to all activity on Lemmy like uneddit used to be for reddit.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago

That's pretty much how everything on the Internet works, FYI. Lemmy is just upfront about it

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

And seemingly nothing is actually deleted, just hidden. Boost for Lemmy currently has an interesting bug where any comment, deleted or removed, can still be seen by simply selecting "copy post text" from the menu, as the API will return what was previously there.

PSA, if you want to delete a comment or post, be absolutely sure you first edit it to be blank.

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[–] [email protected] 138 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Welcome to the hell of being a lemmy admin. There's a reason why lemmy admins are fed up with the developers.

[–] [email protected] 111 points 8 months ago (8 children)

For context, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes when it comes to lemmy admin stuff especially in the matrix channels. There is a significant frustration and lack of confidence in the lemmy developers at this point. Even those who try to contribute to the project get eventually feeling pushed out.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Based on what I've seen on the public facing part of the developer side, I get the feeling this isn't the kind of group that can build the kind of organization required to make this sustainable in the long run.

I'm just waiting for when Beehaw releases that they've given up on Lemmy and have created a new tech stack.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 8 months ago (4 children)

It's open source. We don't have to depend on the original developers.

If it gets too bad, someone can just make a fork.

Afaik people are just impatient with the developers and have different short term goals.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (13 children)

In terms of new tech stack currently theres sublinks being made by devs/admins of a bunch of instances (discuss.online, lemmy.world, programming.dev, etc.)

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (2 children)

That sucks. As a 3rd party Lemmy app developer, I've only had positive interactions with the Lemmy devs. They're even being proactive in communications.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (11 children)

Not sure I understand. How could there possibly be a solution? Isn't this an inherent problem with federation? You can't un-share information

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (2 children)

But you can delete your copy, ask others nicely to delete theirs, and refuse to accept more copies of the same thing.

I'm not sure if Lemmy supports any of this, but it seems pretty important for e.g. child porn.

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 8 months ago (5 children)

So what have they been doing to nuke the csam images, editing the database directly?

[–] [email protected] 65 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Often just nuking all image uploads made during a certain time period. Which is why old image threads in Lemmy have time periods littered with broken images.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (5 children)

I don’t understand why Lemmy needs to have a built-in image server at all. Reddit didn’t have one for the longest time and it was fine. Sure, I don’t think anyone would be particularly happy with going back to Imgur etc., but it doesn’t seem worth the trouble.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 64 points 8 months ago (2 children)

So when I accidentally uploaded those Death Star plans...

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 8 months ago (21 children)

How exactly does Lemmy remain in compliance with laws regarding, for example, a user's right to have all data associated with their account deleted (right to erasure, etc), or ensure that it is only kept for a time period reasonable while the user is actively using your services (data protection retention periods, etc)?

It's not a big deal for me, just strange to think Lemmy of all places would be built to be so anti user's data rights. The user is ultimately the one that decides what is done with their information/property, after all.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Lemmy is not a singular software or website, every instance on its own need to ensure compliance with their respective laws where they are domiciled.

But if instance A is domiciled in the EU, and the content mirrored to instance B in Zimbabwe, where no right to be forgotten exists, then a user of instance A can't invoke any laws beyond what the local admin can control.

That's amazing for high availability of content - it's essentially mirrored in perpetuity - but a nightmare for privacy advocates. AFAIK there haven't been any court cases related to deletion requests, so that's still virgin territory.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 8 months ago (9 children)

That is crazy. He really did seem knowledgeable, and apart from the upload of a sensitive image, he really did what he could.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 55 points 8 months ago (4 children)

If this comment gets to 150 votes in either direction, I'll post my butthole.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago (10 children)

What exactly is a KYC selfie? Is it a photo of an ID card? I figured out WUI is WebUI. The author uses some strange acronyms I never heard before.

It's very American that they can steal your identity with just one photo. My European state issued ID has data on both sides, so if someone would take a photo of it won't be enough for anything. Also if you loose it you just get a new one and noone can use the old one for anything.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 8 months ago

KYC is Business/Finance lingo - "Know Your Client".

Yeah the fact that exposing one number/piece of information puts you at risk to a significant amount of other information about you being exposed is peak USA.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago (6 children)

Dear aussie.zone users,

I can delete photos. Just give me the url of the photo you need killed and I'll happily delete it for you. But also, don't (accidentally) upload a nude.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago (12 children)
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[–] [email protected] 33 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I hate to use it, but this is why I still find imgur useful. It works.

Some stuff on Lemmy just doesn’t have a robust feature set yet. Especially around content moderation.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

I’m a developer of a Lemmy client. When you upload an image to a Lemmy instance, the instance returns a “delete token”. Later, you can ask the instance to delete the image attached to the delete token. So as long as you keep hold of the delete token for a specific image, you’re able to delete it later.

Lemmy-ui (the official frontend) will give you the option to delete an image again shortly after uploading it. However, it’s not possible to remove the image after actually creating the post, as the delete token associated with that post isn’t remembered anywhere on the Lemmy backend.

As for other Lemmy clients, YMMV. The client I work on (Mlem) deletes images if you remove them from a post before posting it, but has the same pitfall as Lemmy-ui in that it won’t delete the image if you’ve already created the post.

It would be possible to locally save the delete tokens of every image you upload, so that you can request that they be removed later. I don’t know of any clients that can do this yet, though (if someone knows of one, feel free to mention it).

Edit: clarity

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This got me curious on how many images are on all Lemmy instances combined and how much storage it all takes up.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I can tell you that for lemmy.ca we use 778gb

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Holy fucking shit balls. I contemplated seeing up an instance on a £5 VPS. Hmmmm, I think my scale is a bit off.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (3 children)

If it's just a private instance, your storage needs will be way less. We use object storage, so it's actually pretty cheap (like $5-10 a month iirc). We're not storing that all on the server disk.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (2 children)

You can consider almost anything publicly posted to Lemmy as permanent. As I keep saying, please be careful.

I do think a way to automatically store the uploaded image urls and associated delete keys under your user is a necessary feature.

For personal image hosting I use postimage, but any external host that lets you modify/remove images under your account will do.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (7 children)

Seems that one of the problems with regards to this post has been recently fixed and will be included in the next release :)

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2385

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What happens when you share a link to an image? Does Lemmy just save the link or does it make a copy of the image?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (7 children)

Isn't this in violation of the gdpr?

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