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How much control/access does my instance owner haver over my account? (lemy.lol)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by AchillesUltimate@lemy.lol to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] dandroid@dandroid.app 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I kinda hope they don't have an API for that. I really didn't like it on reddit when two people would be having a debate on a topic, and one person would search the other person's comment history to find something to attack their character on to hurt their credibility. I think debates should be handled using relevant points about the topic being discussed. Attempts to attack character are very underhanded. It's how politicians debate. It almost like admitting that you couldn't make a better point than your opponent, so you had to stoop to that level.

I think having an API for votes and front ends that showed votes would encourage people to do exactly that here. If front ends started showing that info, I think it would discourage lurkers from voting, which I'm not sure we want.

Obviously there's very little that could or even should be done about admins seeing that info. Admins have full visibility and manipulation power over the DB, and I feel like this wouldn't even make the list of improvements that I think lemmy needs right now. Admins just sort of need to be trusted or people will leave your instance.

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No, there is no API to get the votes (https://join-lemmy.org/api/). If my understanding is correct, now that I upvoted your comment my instance will push that information. I'm not sure whether it pushes it to dandroid.app first or to all instances, saying basically "Sal@mander.xyz upvoted https://dandroid.app/comment/441785", and so every instance that has that comment can save my user ID in the "upvote" list of that comment, and that upvote is counted.

If only the vote direction was federated, then it would be very easy for me to spam the message "Upvote https://dandroid.app/comment/441785". I would not even need to create an instance for that, I just need to speak ActivityPub. And it would be more difficult to detect that I am doing that, because the database would only hold the vote count.

I don't think there is a way to ask an instance to reveal this list. You can only get it by directly querying the database if you have access to it. This is why if you fetch an older post or comment, it will arrive with a single or zero votes.