this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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It's excruciatingly obnoxious to have to rely on third party sources for what should be a first-party feature.

Like, I select all and then search a query. "Oh no, nobody on your server used a third party service to find it, so you won't see it here."

Like, how short-sighted is that, really? If I search for a string in the 'all' servers, I should have a list of 'all' the servers containing that string.

It's a really simple concept. Not sure why this post even has to be made, but I'm wondering if there's something I can do to make these 'features' more intuitive.

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[–] Oisteink@feddit.nl 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Userbase don’t care about how the tech works under the hood - user base sees no content and goes back to Reddit.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The original poster asked why.

I was answering why

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If they can't bother with investigating the platform for 10 minutes, I think they should stay on Reddit and keep complaining about the awful app and website over there.

[–] Oisteink@feddit.nl 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Winning tactic. I’d like to stay a place with people with knowledge and interesting viewpoint, regardless of their ability to find search services on other websites to locate content.

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At this very moment, there is a choice between two options

  • an easy to use place managed by a company that see user data as resources to be sold to advertisers
  • an emerging platform where some features are still being implemented, but without any tracking of its users, and managed by volunteers

Hopefully in the near future some features such as the one highlighted by OP will be integrated in the platform, but right now, it's not, which is why I said that if people cannot search a bit about the current state of Lemmy, they should probably head back to Reddit. And I say that hoping that once the platform is polished enough, they'll come back.

[–] Oisteink@feddit.nl 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How does posting and reading posts work - and how do you know that nobody tracks their users? I was under the assumption that admins of a node have totals access to data going in/out/through their instance.

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just have a look at the data accessed by the apps, both stores display them. It's something else than the Reddit app.

There might be some data agregation on the server side indeed, but compared to the ads promotion machine than Reddit has become (and even announced openly, with subreddits now being platform to promote products), it's a completely different story.

[–] Oisteink@feddit.nl 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What app? As far as I’m concerned there’s no reason to believe that fediverse users aren’t tracked. Probably not all, but where there’s users interacting with each other discussing different subjects there’s money to be made, and data to sell to AI companies for training.

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://lemmy.world/post/2807814?scrollToComments=true

Sort by Top

> “The developer does not collect any data from this app.”

[–] Oisteink@feddit.nl 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The app works between an instance/server and the user. This does not affect what the admins/owners of an instance/server can track.

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's already better than what Reddit does with its app then.

If you want to improve your privacy, browse Lemmy using a VPN and a fingerprint protected browser such as Mullvad browser, and you're pretty much set against potential data collection from our instance admin. You can even share your account with a few other people to make your ghost profile harder to populate.

[–] Oisteink@feddit.nl 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m not sure you understand how the fediverse works on protocol level or how posts are stored. None of what you suggest will protect you. There is no way you can protect yourself from tracking by those with access to raw data.

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm indeed not sure we are talking about the same thing.

You are talking about tracking the data and selling it to AI for training.

I don't even know why AI companies would bother with buying that data when they can just parse that information directly from the website and then train their model on it.

I was talking about selling user profiles to advertising companies willing to reach specific potential customer audiences. In that scenario, the measures I explained prevent your profiling.

[–] Oisteink@feddit.nl 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m talking about tracking and profiling in general. This is possible by crawling to a certain extent, but it’s 100% possible when you have the data of who’s voting up/down on what, and what posts they are shown and how they interact with them.

This is possible from app or website, and that part can be mitigated somewhat by the stuff you proposed. But if you control to the code and database you have 100% access to this information. How you interact with posts are very interesting for AI training and analysis, similar to what Cambridge Analytica had a great run at using Facebook data.

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I guess the only way to really avoid that would have to host your own instance, cut from the rest of the Fediverse, and only allow people you trust to join.

But then that kind of defeats the purpose of a Lemmy-like platform

[–] Oisteink@feddit.nl 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Indeed - or in other words you can trust the fediverse as much as you can trust Reddit

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Reddit is worse, to me, for reasons stated above, but we can agree to disagree