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How are "We" to place trust in the fediverse? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I came here for the same reasons as most of you and chiefly among them was to escape the corporate embrace of common social media platforms.

But how much trust can we place into Lemmy, Mastodon, and/or other various integrated Fediverse platform instances?

I'm all for open-source and transparency which the devs seem to provide, although providing source code and routinely audited source code are entirely different concepts.

Similarly, the high availability of source code may lead to malicious instances, actors, and/or back-end modifications that would favor specific instances resounding consequence throughout the Fediverse.

So I ask simply: How much faith do you have? (Please provide supporting documentation links supporting your answer because I'm genuinely interested.)

EDIT: I literally removed a semi-colon character ':'

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

What do you mean by "trust"?

Do I trust that vanilla Lemmy code doesn't contain something nefarious, such as code that detects political positions it doesn't like and reduces their visibility? Sure. It would be hard to hide something like that.

Do I trust that major servers aren't secretly running software that manipulates content? Mostly yes. I think it would get noticed since there are lots of vanilla servers to compare behavior to.

Do I trust that all the software is well-designed and bug-free? I write software for a living. No software is bug-free and most of it isn't well-designed.

Do I trust that everyone who runs a fediverse server isn't an asshole? Absolutely not. Any jackass can run a server. I run a Mastodon server (on which all users are me).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How can people join your mastodon?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

They can be my really close friends or family and ask me for an account, which I would actively discourage (join something well-run like .world) but eventually allow if they really wanted to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I also choose this guy's Mastodon server