I have had concerns about this since I joined. Personally I don’t mind that the votes are public and can see a case for it, however the wider community is doing a very poor job of informing the users how this all works, and that will result in very bad outcomes.

Lemmy (the wider community) privacy does stink (and how to change that)

You’ll want to post more detail than

the instance would not work

VM doesn’t boot? Backend doesn’t start? Nginx doesn’t start or returns an error when visiting? Database connection?

Thanks! I’m for mass adoption and want admins to succeed. That starts with keeping users educated (and admins covered).

This is largely assumed by someone like yourself or I who understands the implications. I am finding it evident that a lot of people are not aware.

There is also a distinction to a potential screenshot, a scrape or archive no one visits, and a federated copy on a widly used instance you have lost access to.

I edited my comment above to include a project I am working on to hopefully help admins get this across and educate users on how to appropriately engage to their comfort level.

This keeps on being asserted but it is far from true. If defederation happens or your local goes offline, posts/comment history/profile/votes will remain on other widely used instances and out of your control.

A large instance has already defederated with 2 other larger instances. If you run a personal instance I feel it will become very, very common to be be locked out of managing your data.

You can expect defederation to happen all the time as that is a deliberate part of the open federated model.

And that is to say nothing about federation simply breaking sometimes.

I already have been locked out of content that exists on other instances that will remain forever and I’ve only been around a short while. I don’t care personally, but people keep asserting this claim that only bad actors or scrapers will dupe your data. Federated data is very different than a non-federated copy for many reasons and that matters to some people. Everyone should understand deleting your account, or modifying your content will often not remove your content outside your instance, and many people engage outside their local. It will likely exist in federated, Lemmy searchable form forever in some capacity (in the current iteration anyway).

Not trying to spread FUD, but if we want to maintain users they have to be educated as they will find out eventually and not be happy.

I have some working drafts on policies for admins to help them navigate and explain their responsibilities to their users.

It is a bit of a weird read outside of the context, but this is an optional primer I have drafted that will hopefully help explain the distinctions:

https://github.com/BanzooIO/federated_policies_and_tos/blob/main/optional-privacy-policy-intro.md

Due to the nature of such an open policy in sharing information (how open federation actually functions) could be frightening for someone uneducated on what privacy totally means, I have created this optional privacy policy introduction that will prime the user for what they are engaging in.

Personally I think everyone should be walking around with no pants, but I’d rather we talk each other’s pants off than scare off, or find our pants removed by surprise.

https://github.com/BanzooIO/federated_policies_and_tos/blob/main/optional-privacy-policy-intro.md

Due to the nature of such an open policy in sharing information (how open federation actually functions) could be frightening for someone uneducated on what privacy totally means, I have created this optional privacy policy introduction that will prime the user for what they are engaging in.

Personally I think everyone should be walking around with no pants, but I’d rather we talk each other’s pants off than scare off, or find our pants removed by surprise.

https://github.com/BanzooIO/federated_policies_and_tos/blob/main/optional-privacy-policy-intro.md

I have an optional introduction statement I am going to add which might temper it a bit. People are blissfully unaware of how bad current closed platforms are for privacy, the data sharing between them, and what that means for them and society.

Despite some of the open and entirely public aspects of federated services, with some education it is far more private; you are not tracked right from the gateway through all your online (and offline) travels. How you carry yourself during those travels is what gives you control of your privacy.

I have had this concern for a few days and adapted the Mastodon privacy policy (adapted from the Discourse policy) and published it https://github.com/BanzooIO/federated_policies_and_tos/blob/main/lemmy-privacy-policy.md

Discussion on this has been started: https://lemmy.ml/post/1431759 and https://lemmy.ml/post/1431930. Open to any recommendations

You’re right. Apologies.

There are many other models, some discussed in this post. All come with their own set of upsides and downsides.

For a small community, which Lemmy original was, straight up votes work great. Unfortunately it doesn’t scale. Reddit is a perfect example.

You’re right, there is only up/down vote systems with a user base that is in no way verified or otherwise restricted to a single vote/real person, or corporate algos.

There are plenty of different models. Do I fault the Lemmy devs for using it? No. Is it ideal for content discovery? Not really.

The idea is to gauge community interest/relevance and facilitate content discovery. I feel it is becoming a bit dated method of accomplishing this and easily gamed.

Only PostgreSQL at the moment. I also don’t believe it currently supports SSL connection to Postgres so you’ll want to run it on the same machine or have a tunnel to your DB.

There is zero chance you’ll get it running on anything else without significant code change.