Ask Lemmy

What for?

There's nothing on lemmy to monitor. You guys see the vanilla users of reddit and thought r/pics was too spicy.

Sitting around waiting to repost a no kings comment isn't a concern for anyone.

Lemmy is created to post about beans and moths. That's what federation is about. If anyone even thought about rocking the bot with a post that wasn't related to beans or moths then you could stand up another instance and get back to our bean moth funny good time.

Lemmy is the digital left without an unseen well funded invisible hand guiding us. At least not yet. You'd think this is the opportunity to find strategy to build digital spaces to fight back against the rich sizing digital assets. Build communities and discussions to reject corporate influence and push back against the growth of fascism. But no. This is not what federation was ever about. It's about recreating the SFW vanilla reddit front page but worse with less people. Hahaha haha bean moths so fucking cute. Imagine whose beans are these, I don't know. Did you see the post where they photo shopped a moth on a guy eating beans. Fucking wild.

There's nothing to monitor here.

There's no way of knowing. But it would be dumb to assume they aren't. Fun fact: your subscriptions and up/downvotes aren't private on lemmy either, due to the nature of how federation works!

it is safest to assume that any and every communication you have on the open internet that is not end to end encrypted has been ingested, identified, catalogued, and stored in an NSA data center and can be called up at any time for future reference -- and even the encrypted communications may not be secure for much longer, if quantum computing keeps progressing the way it is. Conduct yourself accordingly.

Given a tiny bit of knowledge on big data systems …..

• assume everything accessible is being copied, encrypted or not, kept forever
• there are continuous processes making links to people places times, and connecting the internet to real world data
• when someone wants to search for something, like uses the term “mango Mussolini “, it pretty quickly finds the set of all communications
• then you can further refine it “and lives in the dc area”, and end up with a list of people
• then you have ready links to clever where they’ve posted, everything they’ve said, every person they’ve connected with online or in real life
• and if you have encrypted data, can choose to brute force it (some will have to wait for technology)

It really no longer makes sense to wonder if they’re watching Lemmy. There’s no reason to pick specific places to watch when they can just collect everything, store it, then take their time searching for connections

I just use multiple VPN tunnels with the first two hops still in the US (so it doesn’t look like I’m going offshore) with random delays along the way (to avoid timing analysis) to a Lemmy instance in a privacy-friendly country.

They could probably still figure out who I am if they tried hard enough though.