Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
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Lemmy has quite a few unfortunately invasive qualities of its own, including generally needing an email address from you (Reddit does not), having poor privacy and data retention practices, and generally being very messy with who gets to decide what happens with your data and how easily it can be scraped.
Sure, Reddit sells it... But Lemmy gives it to any web scraper for free.
Which is good. You either have an open system or a closed one. There's no in-between.
If you want to have advantages of public free decentralized network you can't obfuscate and centralize bits and pieces of it. Also, it's 2024, we need to stop this misinformation that email address is supposed to be private. What is private is email address association with the owner and Lemmy doesn't leak or infringe on. The address is literally called address because it's supposed to be public.
...And attitudes like this towards privacy will keep Lemmy from progressing to a point where those issues will be fixed.
I have a fundamental problem with giant corporations scraping user data without user consent. That's a system-level issue. It doesn't become "good" just because they get to scrape without consent for free.
Nah it has nothing to do with attitude but with practicality. This would mean people's fingerprints need to be public and shared between servers or some other hack. It's just possible in any safety and its not really a hill worth dying on. Do we really care about users dodging subreddit bans that much? Its silly.
What would a "fix" look like in your eyes? Do you have na implementation in mind?
I have a few suggestions for development concerns off the top of my head:
* either immediately or, to prevent spam, after some time
I agree with your first few points but I'm unsure about the scraping. This is a public forum, what could be done to mitigate scraping that wouldn't take away form that?
If we take "unlimited unauthenticated API access shouldn't be possible" for granted, I'm unfortunately not all that technically competent about what can be done next.
The first thing that comes to mind is treating website access and app access differently, maybe limiting app API access by default for people who haven't logged in.
Or creating a separate bot API that's rolled out across all servers at some point in the future... And I know federation could pose some serious chokepoints here so that's where my speculation ends.
Instances can enable or disable the email verification and other measures, like asking why you want to join that instance.
I don't recall reddit being so liberal. I haven't used an account I didn't verified in the same day, so I can't say if it works, but I suspect they can enable different protocols for inspecting unverified accs.
As a side-note to that discussion: my VPN works with most services i can't access otherwise while reddit blocked me as I tried to access it to see for myself. I'm surprised.