I noticed that there were some accounts that were hijacked by the instance owners. All the posts from that user were then edited to say what happened.
This kind of surprised me, I figured instances could delete posts, but not edit them. So how much control do they have?
I assume they can’t see my password (hopefully). Can they post in my name? Do they have all the access to my posts to foreign instances that they do over local posts?
Edit: thanks for all the responses everyone! I’ve wanted my own instance for a while, but maybe I’ll get on it now
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Password hashing occurs server-side. Even without removing the hashing step an admin can intercept the plaintext password during login. Use unique safe passwords.
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An admin can intercept the jwt authentication cookie and use any account that lives in the instance.
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Private messages are stored as plaintext in the database
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Admins can see who upvotes/downvotes what
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These are not things that are unique to Lemmy. This is common.
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To avoid having to trust your admin, run an instance.
Quick note,
this is note unique to Lemmy/Fediverse. Reddit admin or twitter admin (and even gmail) can also read your MP, see the hash of your password and remove your comments. Reading your MP is even part of their business model so they can show you personalized ads.
There is definitely a probability to deal with a non reliable instance admin, but not less than with any other social media, and in principle they collect even less data
Technically that’s true.
To build trust and adhere to law, corporations will usually have processes and regulations in place that determine which employees can access and modify what. That is why spez modifying user comments is such a big deal. It showed that Reddit is not to be trusted. Nevertheless, for corporations that value customers trust, any employee who does not adhere to these procedures risks their employment.
On smallish fediverse instances none of these procedures need to be in place, the admin is bound only by his own moral code.
This is true. However keep in mind that instances survive on reputation. As soon as something like this came out, which is inevitable with time, nobody will trust that instance, or the person running that instance, again. And people are usually quite quick to find this out as already demonstrated by other online services. Hiding is very difficult. Even worse, once your reputation falls, people can move to a more respectful server and continue participating in the network, so in the end it’s a losing game for the instance owner. Password safety obviously applies, but if you take a look at big social media privacy and terms, a little password manager in my personal opinion is preferable.
There is definitely a probability to deal with a non reliable instance admin, but not less than with any other social media, and in principle they collect even less data
Yeah. You can see the cookies that are stored by a site by right-clicking on the site, going to “inspect”, and the clicking “Storage”. By default, the only cookie that Lemmy has is an jwt cookie used to authenticate your user.
You are not asked for a phone number to be here. Providing an e-mail is often optional and even discouraged by some instances. When you want to send a private message through the site you get a message discouraging from doing that and encouraging to try to use an encrypted chat application instead, such as matrix.
The original Lemmy instance (lemmy.ml) is a community for FOSS and Privacy enthusiasts. What is asks from a user and what it does with the data is what it needs to be functional. Lemmy lets you take any proactive step that you would like to take to protect your privacy - use a VPN or Tor, use safe passwords, use a unique identity, and don’t provide any personal information. There are no built-in features to block you or discourage you from doing that. Lemmy never asks for your location, nor does it keep any logs of what content you visit, nor does it try to run any analytics on you. But even if that is not enough for you, the fediverse doesn’t lock you out, you can set up an instance or even create a new program to interact and communicate only precisely what you want to communicate via activity pub.
I’m assuming votes are all federated, so I think any instance admin would be able to see who voted in which direction for any post that gets federated to their instance, no? Or is it just the vote count that is federated?
The votes themselves are the federated action.
If you fetch an old post, your instance will not see the previous voters. After that, whenever a user votes the instance will get the message “User X@instance upvoted/downvoted post Y” and the vote will be added to the database with the voter’s user ID and counted.
This has a practical function. If you don’t keep a list specifying who voted for what, it would be much easier to fake votes from one instance to another by simply communicating the message “Downvote post Y”. With the current method it is still possible to create a lot of fake accounts and mass-vote, but at least you can get a better insight when looking at the database if the votes are associated with accounts with no activity from a single instance.
There are some federated platforms that will show who likes / dislikes something. I know that friendica used to do this - I have not checked if it still does. So it is not only admins who can see this, this is is basically open information in the fediverse.
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Can you recommend a good free web host for running your own instance? I haven’t dabbled in web development in over 15 years now, so I’m kinda out of the loop.
I’m not sure about Web Hosting. Many of us use a dedicated virtual private server (VPS)
I use https://serverspace.io, I think Lemmy.ml is hosted with https://www.hetzner.com/
These are servers that you access via SSH and can install the instance inside of it. I personally install using docker compose, but there are some other methods that are claimed to be easier. The cost starts at ~$5 / month. Currently I pay about $15 / month. You would then rent the domain name from a domain name registrar (I use namecheap.com) and ask them to point the domain name to your server’s IP address.
I looked into it and gave up after half a day of trying. I can’t figure out how this SSH thing works at all.
I’m used to CPanel and uploading files via FTP. I can code some CSS and manage a MySQL server, but this modern era of web development goes over my head. Apparently now you have to pick a Linux distro and install it, instead of it just being ready to go for you. (At least that’s how it worked with Oracle).
Thanks for trying to help but I’m too old for this shit now. I don’t even know what “docker compose” means. I’ve read the official documentation and looked at tutorials, but it’s all a foreign language to me now. Like I said, in my day you just uploaded the files via FTP, changed some lines in a config file, redirected your .com to your nameservers in CPanel, and you were good to go. Installing an instance is 10x more difficult. Wasted $9 on a domain for nothing… *sigh*
Oracle has a pretty decent free tier.
Thanks
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Just to correct the people who say they can’t see your password - this is only true if they’re running a stock copy of lemmy, which hashes passwords in the database.
They’re free to modify their instance however they want, including storing unencrypted passwords or emailing your password on registration to a bot farm.
Always use a unique password for every site you use.
Before people get worried about this, this is how literally any online service works. If you have an account anywhere, you trusted that service to not record your password.
Only exception is oauth, which actually might be a good idea for Lemmy.
An instance owner having access to the database can surely change the password to access the account and then change it back. If you’re the server owner, you can do anything you want directly on the database.
Yes but if I was a dick, I’d just harvest their passwords silently and then try them on other websites.
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Oh boy, I have a bad feeling about this
A lot of people here mentioned that passwords are hashed, but unless I missed it no one pointed out the following:
The admin of your instance controls your login form and they can pull your password when you log in. So, as others mentioned: always use unique passwords, never ever reuse them.
In general a server admin can do anything they want on their own instance.
Federation wise I’d say if your home instance is the bad actor you are screwed, if it’s another instance then their capabilities for mischief hare probably (hopefully?) more limited. And any such action would likely cause a swift defederation of the malicious instance
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They have full control over the account. Since they control the server, they can modify the database to do whatever they want.
Lemmy needs GPG signatures!
Admins would still be able to change your key, wouldn’t they?
Sure but you can also post your public key somewhere else for people to verify.
Or instances could store public keys of users from other instances, sorta like blockchain validation.
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That could be an interesting idea. It might be needed at some point down the line
The passwords are hashed (AFAIK), but the instance admin has effectively full control of any and all data originating on their instance, right down to the database level.
There has to be some level of guaranteed trust for any instance to work. And in some capacity there is inherent trust across the entire Fediverse that instances federating content are to be trustworthy. It’s no different than any other forum from the old web days- there’s zero guarantees and there’s no way around it.
as instance admins, they have access to the database, so they straight up can edit any data.
only thing they can’t do is view your password (hashed), but they can replace the hash by one of a known pw.
so you must have some trust in your instance owner, again whats good with the fediverse is that you can just start your own instance, and then the best they can do is defederate from you or ban you.
Your instance owner can easily change your password and log in as you.
You can counter that by using multiple accounts from different instances. Use at least 3, if one is compromised, you have the other 2 to counter any impersonation attempts. Make sure you link your other instance profiles in every profile description page. Then use an archive website to save each profile page. If any 1 account is compromised, use the other 2 to tell people the account has been taken over by someone else. And you have the archived profile page that links to the alt accounts to verify that it is indeed your 2 alts.
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They literally created the webpage. Always assume the owner has absolute power over everything.
This is how any website is. Reddit can do the same thing, it’s why some users who edited all their comments there had them reverted back.
This is an opportunity to learn how web services work, at least.
On which instance did this stuff happen? I’d like to defederate for sure.
