Lemmy instance admin snooping at votes

forgotmylastusername , 4 months ago

You would think adversarial actors would find this problematic in their own way. Does no one remember anymore way back when reddit was exposed as being an American state apparatus? Reddit owners its earlier more naive era used to share site metrics. They inadvertently revealed that large amounts of activity comes from a US military base. Then they wiped evidence and disavowed all knowledge that any of that ever happened. And now the narrative on there is that other state actors are the ones in control of that platform. How convenient.

White hat actors could be using such open access to data to reveal whats in the data. That's what the big social platforms are so scared of themselves. Not only is it their financial bread and butter. Contained within is who know how many skeletons piled up over the years.

Everyones privacy these days is basically long gone. There's illusion that internet platforms are in any way shape or form fair or balanced because of the paper thin concept of internet votes == democracy or something. Yet a lot of people stubbornly persist. It's past due time to shine a light on the adversarial actors run amok. Show us the anomalies in data that reveal how the typical real human user is powerless against adversarial actors.

I'd like to think it would be the last straw for the whole concept of social platforms at least the way that it is now. Who knows though. It's also shown us how dumb people are. They could very well just "meh" and go back to mindlessly infinite scrolling.

Omega_Haxors , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

From what I understand votes are publicly available data, Lemmy just chooses to hide them to prevent the "chilling effect" where people feel afraid to vote honesty for fear of repercussions. Then they reintroduced it for admins so they can do their duties in stopping vote manipulation, for example people who go onto your profile and downvote literally every comment you make (it's already happened to me like 3 times) or those who use all of their alts to try and sway momentum on a comment their main makes. There's also times where there's no justification for a comment being upvoted; perfect example is when a nazi says "based" in response to an article about someone being racist and it gets like 20 upvotes. I don't think anyone reasonable would be against a banwave on something like that.

Obviously admins can see everything that goes through their servers for what should be obvious reasons, so this is more of a convenience thing. Moral of the story: don't join shitty crypto instances.

amju_wolf , 4 months ago

perfect example is when a nazi says “based” in response to an article about someone being racist and it gets like 20 upvotes. I don’t think anyone reasonable would be against a banwave on something like that.

I would absolutely be against that. Voting should not be bannable outside of vote manipulation itself. If the content is offending, remove that (and possibly ban the user), but not people who vote on it. That's just stupid "guilty by association" nonsense. And besides, voicing stupid opinions (in moderation) is still better than suppressing free speech.

Lemmy just chooses to hide them to prevent the “chilling effect” where people feel afraid to vote honesty for fear of repercussions.

I find that kinda stupid as well. It leads people to think that their votes are private when literally anyone can view them with a bit of work. Sure the chilling effect sucks but it's better than misleading people. At the very least they should be warned when they sign up.

Omega_Haxors , 4 months ago

... really? You think that upvoting what amounts to "hey any fellow nazis here?" should be allowed...? 😒

amju_wolf , 4 months ago

I think that if you allow that question in the first place, voting on it should not have any consequences either.

Besides, despite what most people instinctively think it's better to see what you disagree with so that you can keep your eyes on it rather than forcing it into hiding and knowing nothing (again, in moderation - you probably don't want to run an actual Nazi instance, so if it does bother you you should moderate that post/comment).

And mistakes still happen; it's easy to accidentally upvote/downvote something by mistake, to misunderstand someone, etc. So yes, I do think banning people based on what they up/downvote is a bad idea.

Omega_Haxors , 4 months ago

Your argument is "we should keep nazis around just make sure they behave" which is not a point i'm willing to entertain.

amju_wolf , 4 months ago

Man, please, learn to read. My whole point is that you should not care about what people upvote.

So once again: if you are okay with the original comment/post - which means you are fine with keeping Nazis on and what they have to say on your platform - then you should be okay with people who "react" on that content.

Or maybe you aren't fine with it, so you should delete the offending post or comment, and then you won't be bothered by the reactions either.

Omega_Haxors , 4 months ago

Because you can't also ban the person who posted it. For god sake this is the level of faith we are on. Go outside, this thread ended yesterday.

crispy_kilt , 4 months ago

Guys. The person running the website you use always can do and see everything

This has nothing to do with lemmy

LWD , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

7heo , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

No. A simple website won't help, it needs to be a Lemmy instance. Moreover, it needs to be a federated one.

And then, that "invisible" data being available to other admins, is a problem with federation, not with Lemmy.

Now, there could very well be efforts made to make the cleartext data of each instance users available only to the admins of that instance (and only share aggregated data with other instances), but that would also require a lot more consideration wrt mutual instance trust in the network.

Right now, since votes and other actions are public (to the federated instances admins anyway), it is doable to detect and assert foul play. The downside of this is that it allows abusers to malevolently collect data and do the same bad things that you are so certain the alternatives to Lemmy don't do (yeah, as if).

If the instances shared only aggregated data with one another, it would be much harder for abusive small instance owners to spy on any user on the network (still possible, but it would essentially would be as hard as for anyone else, as it would involve heuristics and lots of intelligence, to interpolate the missing information); but it would also be much harder for legit admins trying to enforce moderation to inspect what happened on federated instances. They would have to take those instance's admins at their words.

As an additional note: that "invisible" data that other platforms allegedly don't share, is for sale. That's what surveillance capitalism is all about... At least with Lemmy, the barrier of entry to get our data is "federation", not "money".

Edit: WTF bro, a day and a half before writing this wrong comment I'm answering to, you wrote a properly worded, technically correct (top level) comment... Were you half asleep on this one??

Edit 2: nah, the reason why your other comment was technically correct and properly worded is that you stole it (would have been so easy to give credit...) SMH. 😮‍💨

Edit 3: So I checked your comment history (after seeing that other comment of yours about the user that mass downvoted you, I was legit curious how bad it could have been), you seem technically knowledgeable, and also educated. Thus, I reiterate, this specific comment, what gives!?

Edit 4: lol at your edit. 😶‍🌫️

LWD , 4 months ago

Off day 😉

I should have been more specific when I said website, as... If you scan my other comments, you might have the hint that I have access to one such Lemmy instance. And they federate with minimal effort. I don't know how to automate it yet, but it wasn't hard to do so manually.

7heo , 4 months ago

I'm actually curious to know if federated instances share the data of their federated instances... if so, there is a proper reason to be actually alarmed, as ACLs would essentially be cosmetic only.

LWD , 4 months ago

Can you be more specific? I might be able to hunt down answers.

Recently, federation vulnerabilities got exploited by an ex-Truth Social employee who apparently believes consent is only when someone shouts "no" at him, so pretty much anything is possible (without even going through the effort of spinning some kind of proxy server, if I'm reading this correctly).

7heo , 4 months ago

Well, as in let's say instance A is federated to B, B federated to C, A blacklisted C.

So, clearly, A isn't getting data about C. It will drop it on ingress (I expect).

But, will C have access to the exact same data about A, through B, that it would have access to from A if not blocked by A?

LWD , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

"Indirect federation" (what I ended up eventually trying to find info on) appears non-existent.

That answered the question, I think, but it caused me to ask a few more, like this one:

What happens if a community is on Server A and Person C wants to check out how Person B is interacting on it. I think, in that case, that Person C can check out Person B's profile and see comments left on a Server A community, but they cannot navigate to the post itself because Server A would not send the content to their server.

It's relatively easy to switch servers, by clicking the little rainbow icon next to a particular comment to see the server where it would have been viewed in Person B's context, but servers on their own are not running around scraping missing data... At least, not as they are currently designed.

ETA: More background on the major defederation in question (mostly political, not technical)

7heo , 4 months ago

Thanks for digging and reporting on this, but I'm gonna take a break with my phone (the main way I interact with Lemmy), since it is such a steaming pile of shit.

I'll try to find a way to use Lemmy on a proper OS without using the horrendous web interface (hopefully there are cool clients out there), and then I'll see. 👋

CaptPretentious , 4 months ago

Oh good, Lemmy had no privacy. Not like that ability isn't going to be abused.

Either make it public right from the start everyone sees everything. Or make this crap not possible.

You're going to get echo chambers that start witch hunts. Someone is going to dox someone because they don't like how someone votes... Yadda yadda someone gets swatted or someone just shows up... Then someone's going to start cheering "We did it Lemmy!"...

Honestly at least with Reddit you had one single evil entity that would abuse their power and trust of users.

LWD , 4 months ago

That's an interesting point. One company, like Reddit, might see human beings as nothing more than content mills, but that created incentives to be a little private at least.

Lemmy servers are run by anybody, including Facebook, and you don't even have to accept someone else's server rules for your data to transfer onto it. The process occurs passively.

clever_banana , 4 months ago

I wish more admins would make votes public on their instances, so the whole community could work together to identity bad actors

1984 , 4 months ago

Ok. These votes are not about picking presidents, so...

rimu , 4 months ago

I notice that monero.town has a large image of Pepe the nazi frog in it's sidebar: https://monero.town/pictrs/image/afb3860f-022e-4723-be3f-74041da2abc9.webp?format=webp

What's the connection between Monero and the alt-right?

ReversalHatchery , 4 months ago

I haven't heard before that this frog is a nazi symbol. I'm also seeing it relatively often at places where I don't think it's use would be accepted if that was the case

Coskii , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

A few (it feels like 3+) years ago it was attributed to 4chan and something politically extremist by some journalists. I don't remember what the article was about, so I went and found one.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-pepe-the-frog-hate-symbol-20161011-snap-htmlstory.html

Edited in a better one.

ReversalHatchery , 4 months ago

That's good to be aware of, thanks!

rimu , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Pepe the frog is absolutely a hate symbol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog#Use_by_the_alt-right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTQLaLwz88Y

https://www.diggitmagazine.com/articles/amplifying-far-right-reassessing-case-pepe-frog

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-pepe-the-frog-hate-symbol-20161011-snap-htmlstory.html

Danitos , 4 months ago

Like the swastika, is not the only use it has. In the gaming/Twitch community, it's definitely not massively used as a hate symbol.

Omega_Haxors , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Sad news for your argument, gaming culture (gamergate) and Twitch (crackergate) have a long history of white supremacy. I will agree that it's spun off to be less about overt nazism and more about white male fascism. Doesn't change the gross history of the symbol, and i'm still going to treat anyone who posts frogs as being way further right than I want to deal with because it's always the guy posting frogs who ends up driving people off the server further down the road. TL;DR It's softened from nazism to reactionary but is still very much right wing shit.

Danitos , 4 months ago

I'm very aware of how toxic gaming communities can be, but I don't see how that refutes my point that Pepe is used with non-hate purposes in the gaming community. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised at all if 90% of the people aren't aware of Pepe's relationship with far right, neo-nazis and 4-chan. I still wouldn't call them any of these words for liking and sharing the frog with the expressive face.

On the other hand, not wanting to deal with people that post/use Pepe in any sort of way is respectable, albeit seems like a giant social bubble to me.

TW: slurs ahead.

This whole thing remins me of "marica" and "maricón", Spanish words that are used in a few contexts and meanings, the main one bieng "faggot". Recently, tho, they have increased their popularity in the LGBTQ+ community as a self-describing word, in a "fuck you, homophobics" tone. My point is that dismissing these groups as being too far right over using "maricón" would be devoid of context and interest in others. Note as well I'm not claiming all use of "maricón" is respectable and friendly.

amio , 4 months ago

It's not just a 4chan thing, it's used innocuously in gaming all the time.

LWD , 4 months ago

It all depends on context, but as one example this guy
Pepe sweating
(aka Poggers) is part of Twitch chat culture.

And Twitch doesn't slouch on extremist content. They banned this emote
Pogchamp guy
because the guy who made that face was supporting Jan 6.

amio , 4 months ago

Yeah. The pog/-champ emotes were nice somehow, too bad the guy's a dipshit.

LWD , 4 months ago

A widely used meme and crypto bros

https://twitter.com/FortuneMagazine/status/1420803860336152577/

Omega_Haxors , 4 months ago

What’s the connection between Monero and the alt-right?

Cryptocurrency would be a good first guess.

LWD , 4 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.

Sal , 4 months ago

Is the fact that I recognize this comment evidence that I use Lemmy a bit too much? 😅

LWD , 4 months ago

Caught in 4k stealingq liberating a really good comment

clever_banana , 4 months ago

Please do this. Its really not an issue.

The solution is simply to use anonymous accounts and change them frequently. This should be more publicized as normal lemmmy data hygene

CaptPretentious , 4 months ago

So 4chan but with extra steps...

Has Lemmy already jumped the shark.

clever_banana , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Wut? The data is already public. Why only allow the bad guys to access it and not everyone?

Everything you do online will be used against you unless you do so anonymously. This isn't a Lemmy problem. Its only specific to Lemmy if we as a community dont inform each other of the risks and encourage safe data hygienic practices

LWD , 4 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.

clever_banana , 4 months ago

Do you understand how federation works?

Badeendje , 4 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

UndercoverUlrikHD , 4 months ago

I think the idea is to make it easier to detect trolling/spam from certain accounts. But honestly, there's no reason upvotes and downvotes can't just be public.

aeharding , 4 months ago

Mods too next release :/

Annoyed_Crabby , 4 months ago

I think the main complain anyone would have with this is, only we admin can look at the vote, and no one else can. This isn't a problem in Kbin or any other platform that allow one to do so.

I only check the vote to see if there's any brigading, other than that, i have no issue with other admins snooping or whatever. Ohh to be clear, all of us admin can see the vote everywhere, getting a new instance yourself will not solve anything.

Asudox , 4 months ago

A new PR allowing mods to see the votes was merged a few weeks ago.

Maestro , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Why not allow anyone to see the votes? Anyone already can by using kbin or spinning up their own instance.

RedWizard , 4 months ago

I think there is an assumption that is rooted in how reddit worked, that votes are anonymous. People operating under that assumption might not like having that blanket ripped off. It would be different if it was up front from the start.

Annoyed_Crabby , 4 months ago

Yeah, but for that you have to open a ticket suggesting that.

po_tay_toes , 4 months ago

I think it's clearly available on several other activity pub platforms, last time I checked one could see individuals voting when subscribing to Lemmy communities from Friendica.

It's still against the spirit of Lemmy to post it publicly on here...

taladar , 4 months ago

It is against the nature of information to want to broadcast it and also keep it secret at the same time.

AngryishHumanoid , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Lol:

"All those account outside of monero.town are most likely angry commies that just follow posts from here to downvote."

People outside my echo chamber think I'm an asshole, it must be a conspiracy!

davel , 4 months ago

We do see the votes. Publicly posting them sounds like poor form, but then what do you expect from crypto bros?

Pick a trustworthy instance or better yet, host your own.

Running your own instance isn’t going to hide your votes.

On , 4 months ago

I'm curious, If I delete my account periodically, are the profile and activity like comments/votes still out there in other instances? are votes deducted? I'm not sure if this is the right question but does deleting accounts federate?

davel , 4 months ago

I’m not one to half-ass it, so someone more knowledgeable than me will have to field these.

taladar , 4 months ago

I am not sure about the details of intended behaviour but it certainly won't federate to anyone deliberately disabling that part of federation so for privacy purposes you might as well assume that it doesn't federate.

LWD , 4 months ago

I can't answer your question about the votes, but posts and comments are retained when you hit the delete button. The only way to delete them is to edit the content beforehand. I believe moderators are capable of restoring posts, but I haven't checked the comments yet.

There's no reason where this has to be the behavior by default; federation alone is a challenge but not an excuse. Ironically, when it comes to privacy, a company like Reddit (with sketchy privacy policies) might be better than Lemmy (a series of entities in a variety of jurisdictions where your data is protected by the weakest of all of their privacy policies)

mozz , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Every up and down vote you make is public. Friendica, kbin, and mbin all expose who voted on every post to any user, and anyone tech savvy on any software can dig out the totals at any time.

In my mind the UI should make this very obvious (honestly I think there should be a pop-up that warns new users of this every time they vote until they check a box to disable it), because it's not what people expect. But votes are very public.

deweydecibel , 4 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

In my mind the UI should make this very obvious (honestly I think there should be a pop-up that warns new users of this every time they vote until they check a box to disable it), because it's not what people expect. But votes are very public.

Which de-incentivizes voting, choking off the thing needed to aggregate the content. Kind of underlining the problem with the votes being public.

mozz , 4 months ago

Votes pretty much have to be public in order for the whole federated system to work -- otherwise anyone could just stuff 50 votes for their favorite comment, and there'd be no way to tell where they came from. Given that, I think it's important that the software be honest with people about the situation, "disincentive" or not. Personally I'm fine with my votes being public, but an important part of that is that I know they're public and can vote accordingly.

homura1650 , 4 months ago

Not nessasarily, the protocol could be written so that an instance simply tells other federared instances "X of my users upvoted this, and Y downvoted this".

The tradeoff being that instance then have less tools to work with to moderate voting. Instead of being able to do global vote ring detection, the most they can do is look for abuse on their own server, and trust that every instance they vote-federate with does the same. Even then, with every instance trying to be vigilant, no one instance would have the info to detect a cross-instance abuse.

mozz , 4 months ago

That would make it possible in general for any instance operator to game the system in ways that are by design impossible to analyze, for dubious benefit.

It would also involve some pretty substantial changes from the current ActivityPub protocol (not just a new way the protocol works, but a change to some of what are currently its core operating principles about e.g. deduplication of entities across the network). You'd have to either talk the authors of every ActivityPub software into accepting your new way, or else abandon the idea of your software being able to interoperate with other ActivityPub software.

Max_P , 4 months ago

The votes are public. Kbin displays them right in the UI. Lemmy semi-hides it, but it's never been designed to be private in any way.

Changing instance won't do shit if that's a concern to you. As an admin I can see them even if my instance isn't involved with the post at all:

https://lemmy.max-p.me/pictrs/image/6bae7aa5-20a3-497e-9012-dc4c8a869eb4.png

skankhunt42 , 4 months ago

So really, I just need to host my own instance to see votes. Nice.

LWD , 4 months ago

Meet new friends, find new foes!

A table of downvotes

What's the worst that could happen?

AtariDump , 4 months ago

Oh boy.

Brigading is back on the menu boys! /s

(Don’t actually do this)

Max_P , 4 months ago

And this is why we have access to the votes, and why the protocol doesn't obfuscate them.

Admins can deploy scripts to detect those kinds of patterns and act on it.

7heo , 4 months ago

I hope the "published" column is the time at which that user downvoted you and not the time at which you posted the original content... there is less than 2s in between some.

LWD , 4 months ago

It was the time of each of the downvotes. I'm pretty sure the behavior was done by a bot, because there were way more downvotes across a bunch of unrelated posts.

I have way more data than my own, and there's a few users I've identified who appear to be botting other users aggressively. Not sure where to drop that data set, but it'll be funny.

pop OP , 4 months ago

didn't know that. thanks!