• 2 Posts
  • 63 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • At some point meta tried purchasing anonymized patient data from hospitals.

    We are also discovering there are many subtle way to identify a person, like grammar, spelling speech patterns (tor specifically warns against this).

    Chances are high they already have some data on you, all they need is enough subtle unique things in your data to rule out anyone else. Based on the times your most active and references you might make.

    Now i am not a zuck owned superai but to give you my human attempt for an initial culling:

    A social security number is the name of the American name of such number. Purposely sounding American is a strategy on itself for non Americans but the act of trying to hide your identity by pretending to be from the us can be an identifier as-well. You also seem to be more on the political left so your your likely part one of 160 mil people (for convenience i am assuming a 50% split in left/right ideology in the us)

    In most countries your isp have some of your personal details your isp is also able to see all the internet domains you visit. They cant see what you do on them but because every instance has its own domain they have a timestamped list of all federated instances you visit.

    It only takes that info to be leaked/hacked or sold for the big corps to obtain it. Of course if you use a vpn your isp cant see the domain but if you do have a vpn congratulations cause its yet another identifier and they too can be hacked or be selling this data.

    The best way and only (still not guaranteed) way to remain anonymous is by using tor browser in windowed mode. Refraining from interacting and if you post to run your speech trough an ai algorithm to generalize/neutralize any personality from it.


  • As a lemmy user i can click your name and scroll trough a list of all posts and comments you have made. Thats your data and its currently free for the taking to any corporation.

    Eventually instances may develop ways to protect their users from this for example make posts only visible to verified human members that are members of a community. Now imagine a user joining such community from the meta threads apps. It wouldn’t be beneath them to fulltime record the app screen and ocr all the text the user sees.


  • Pros: millions of users can interact with your instance

    Cons: This is a super blatant attempt to consume all data. They have been doing this for years. “Log in with facebook” They see the value of the fediverse and aim to become the mainstream place for new accounts. Those users can then interact with any kind off community they want. Meta is not responsible for content on other instances. But they are harvesting all of it trough millions of clueless spies.









  • The way i see it the best way forward would be each community runs there own instance and what we now call communities should become subtopics of that community.

    So for example. Asklemmy could be an instance and its members are all people who believe in the value of that instance and want to be involved in sustaining it.

    Explainlikeiam5 could be a subcommunities of this instance because its philosophy is largely the same. If asklemmy has plenty of scientist members they could open a askscience subcommunity too.

    The majority of user traffic would all come from other smaller homerun instances.

    Big instances that try to be everything at once are a side effect of the massive growth we are experiencing, they work now but will slowly become more centralized and are therefore doomed to fail (in my opinion)

    To recalculate. How can we help Lemmy grow? By being proactive users that maintain something small we chose to care about.