So I was going through /all and this admin is snooping at vote counts for posts in his instance and then posting it publicly.

Just a reminder that these kind of petty people exist. Pick a trustworthy instance or better yet, host your own.

Archive: https://archive.md/oybyL

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    8910 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      1010 months ago

      How to work out what instance(s) if someone does this: A Lemmy instance doesn’t have to send the same voting data to every instance, it could send different votes to different instances (stock Lemmy federates the same thing consistently, but there is no reason a modified Lemmy designed to catch someone doing this has to), encoding a signal into the voting pattern. Then, just check to see what signal shows up. If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.

      • deweydecibel
        link
        English
        710 months ago

        All of which begs the question why are we bothering to pretend any of this is actually democratic or that the fediverse is truly unified across instances.

        On a fundamental level, this “choose your voters” thing breaks the integrity of the voting system. I understand why it needs to happen to combat rogue instances, but the level of manipulation and silent curation that is possible, without the average user’s knowledge, means no one can trust the numbers they see on any instance.

        There’s just so many avenues for abuse here, and it’s disheartening to not see more acknowledgement of that from the devs.

        • Turun
          link
          fedilink
          210 months ago

          It’s a fundamental property of the federated system. The devs need to acknowledge it the same way you need to acknowledge that people can lie. It’s a fact, there is no easy way around it and everyone knows it.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            1
            edit-2
            10 months ago

            They could always federate an aggregate statistic instead of one that discourages involvement. Then we could acknowledge both federation and the lie!

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        110 months ago

        If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.

        A smarter system won’t just take the mean of the votes from different instances but rather discard outliers as invalid input (flagging repeat offenders to be ignored in the future) and use the median or mode of the remainder. The results should also be quantitized to avoid leaking details about sources or internal algorithms; only the larger trends need to be reported.

        Of course you could always just keep the collected data private and only provide it to customers willing to pay $$$ for access, which handily limits instance operators’ ability to reverse-engineer the source of the data. And nothing prevents you from using separate instances for public and private data sets.

      • @CaptPretentious
        link
        510 months ago

        So 4chan but with extra steps…

        Has Lemmy already jumped the shark.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            210 months ago

            The data is already public.

            A descriptive statement.

            Why only allow the bad guys to access it and not everyone?

            Why assume that’s the only option? We can also strive to improve Lemmy, as it is (allegedly) run for the users and not for corporate anti-privacy interests.