which government? there are plenty of those.
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Lemmy is a massive collection of separate servers and communities run by people. Therefore no government has a hold on it. I’m a guy that pays money out of his own pocket monthly to run a Lemmy server. If the government is controlling it, that’s news to me, and my comment history is pretty damn anti-government.
The whole point of decentralization is to remove control from the corporations and governments, and put it back into the hands of the people.
That’s an awesome instance name btw
Thanks! I think it’s among my favorite things I’ve done this year lol. I tried to get “destroying.yachts” but it was taken. Felt a little too obvious too; I like the added humor of “enjoying” instead.
Broke: Yacht destroyer
Bespoke: Yacht "enjoyer"
Has it anything to do with orcas overturning boats in the Mediterranean and teaching other orcas to do the same thing or am I old (I'm old) and out of touch?
Yep! I’m old too. I thought of those stories, learned the “.yachts” TLD exists, and the rest is history. It was nice to see nature fighting back and winning.
If the government also runs a server, does your seever send them a copy of every (public) post you make?
Potentially, yeah, but they can also just go to the website themselves and read it since it’s public.
While governments can't directly manipulate Lemmy, you should still operate on the assumption that nothing you do here is anonymous.
As with anything and everything on the Internet...
While governments can’t directly manipulate Lemmy
What the fuck are you smoking? Of course they can.
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"The government"? You're going to need to be more specific, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of governments.
That said, each instance of Lemmy is run differently, some are more restricted than others but "the government" wouldn't really have anything to do with administration unless it was hosting the instance or the person hosting it was acting on behalf of "the government" (aside from the laws that govern the location of the instance's host, of course).
Incidentally, I think some instances actually are, openly, run by governments.
I know about Mastodon instances run by the government, but are there any lemmy instances run by governments?
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Which government?
What do you mean? There's only one government, clearly.
[Happy Illuminati noises]
No you can't threaten to harm public officials here and get away with it nor is that censorship.
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I nominate this thread for “sketchiest question on Lemmy”.
In all seriousness, at the end of the day, the legal side of this hasn’t been thoroughly tested. I would personally err on the side of caution and abide by the stricter of the laws between your country and your instance’s country. If either prohibit criticism of government, you may run into issues depending on the combination of countries. It’s safe to assume instance owners don’t have a gigantic legal fund either, so they may be more easily forced to give up access logs which could be used to trace you.
There’s also the forever unsaid “don’t be a dick” clause. If a country prohibits some form of speech, don’t intentionally try to get instance owners in that country in trouble.
In all seriousness, at the end of the day, the legal side of this hasn’t been thoroughly tested.
Sure it has. There's nothing overly novel going on here with Lemmy or ActivityPub. There are servers that host instances which host content. If they exist within the jurisdiction of country N, then said laws and government have some level of influence on it. Unless it's hosted in like Sealand or some lawless place with terrible Internet connection, which is super unlikely.
If your instance is hosted in the US, the federal government can still get subpoena access under the PATRIOT ACT and put the owner under gag and we'd never know.
If your instance is hosted in the US, the federal government can still get subpoena access under the PATRIOT ACT and put the owner under gag and we'd never know.
Which is why all instance owners need to implement some form of digital canary.
There’s a few concerning notes in the user’s post history too.
You're 100% not anonymous. On Lemmy it's trivial to see who you are. If your activities put you in danger from your local authorities, lemmy is going to be very dangerous for you.
Let's suppose your documenting human rights abuses in authoritarian country A. You post that documentation to a local Lemmy instance. That instance is federated. Your post makes it across the lemme verse. All is good. But repressive government A wants to kill that post. So they Target the original Lemmy instance, and all of the users using it, that they can exert control over. They may not know a specifically you, but an authoritarian government would have no problem talking to everybody using that instance.
If you're in danger from local authorities, you need to use more than just Lemmy. Use tor, using anonymous VPN, follow the EFFs guide for investigative journalists.
I'm sorry, what?
We are not a big instance, but there is no way on earth we are handing any details of our users to some foreign government. It would actually be against Australian law to do that if we even wanted to.
Hell, we don't even know anything about our users. Most of them have provided an email. That's literally all we know about them.
An oppressive government doesn't need your cooperation, they can simply monitor the traffic and see who's connecting to your instance from their country. Especially if the user isn't using a VPN. Some governments are in the habit of logging all internet traffic, maybe not the data itself, but the flow information. So then they just look at who from their country was connected to your instance at the time of this post. And it becomes fairly easy for them to backtrack responsibility
If it happens to be the government of the location of the server, they can physically take it and take the logs.
If the country of the servers location, and the oppressive government have legal agreements, it could be part of a criminal investigation which gives up the users information, or civil discovery.
Lemmy is decentralized, which is great, but it is not anonymous.
Not to mention the Mosaic theory of information discovery, most users are probably outing themselves through all of their posts. If they post frequently. Especially if you have domestic information sources, you can take photos find locations, take all the constraints from all their posts and find a fingerprint for the person. You could do it for me. I've outed enough information from my posts where you can find who I am if you have enough ancillary data.
Our servers sit behind cloudfront, the same as half the Internet. All that foreign government will see is cloudfront traffic. That won't tell them much. I don't think Amazon will give out their data to some foreign government easily either, since that's their whole business model.
It isn't as trivial to identify a user from their metadata as you seem to be saying.
I stand behind my advice.
Especially because the OP is posting from suppo.fi and not using your setup from Aussie.zone.
If someone is at risk, they should follow the data hygiene suggested by the EFF. Especially if they're concerned about their safety. Which was the implication in OP's post.
To your point about cloud front, not all web clients use encryptid hello yet, or encrypted DNS, so people monitoring connections to cloud front can see the domain you're trying to connect to. This is exactly why CloudFront and AWS were upset with the signal foundation for doing domain front running when connecting to their services.
I think there's a real fear that federation can potentially leak a significant amount of user data, down to IPs and tracking fingerprints. Even if the version in the main git doesn't do that, it's not inconceivable that this kind of data mining could be quietly implemented as extensions/forks at some point. The threat surface just seems so massive with all the different servers involved in the trust model.
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On the internet, even if it's a very nice open source platform, always operate under the assumption that nothing you say or do is anonymous. This is Internet usage 101, however, people seem to always ignore this. Do with this as you will :)
Nice try, FBI.
I'll test it:
The government is a big stupid doodoo head.
We'll see if this gets removed.
American says: "We have democracy in our country. I can stand in front of the White House and shout "Down with Reagan!" and I will not be punished". Soviet replies: "Oh, not a big deal, we also have democracy. I can stand in the Red Square and shout "Down with Reagan!" and I will not be punished either."
I’ll test it:
The government is a great.
We’ll see if this gets removed.
Hasn't been removed yet, no censorship.
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Is Lemmy also censored by the government?
Not directly. You would have to check with your instance owner if they're reporting to your local government, as well as any instances you post to. Assume yes until confirmed otherwise.
Or can I just openly discuss anything against the government here?
This is a completely different question. Because Lemmy is a clearnet site, and frankly is more public by design than other social media sites, you probably shouldn't discuss anything that could get you in trouble with your government if spoken anywhere else without using TOR or similar anonymizing software.
Everything you post here is going to be public, so be mindful if you fear that anything you say could be held against you. No censorship (except the usual moderation done by community moderators) but imagine the police browsing through your Lemmy profile, reading all your posts/comments, after you have been charged with an allegation. In my case, police officers will surely have more than one heartfelt laughs...
I would assume it would depend in which country the server is hosted in.
Watch the birds! There are no birds!
Depends on the government.
The internet is endlessly being scraped for data, especially by governments. Lemmy can be scraped just as easily as any other website.
Some governments are happy to let people more or less discuss whatever, because they know revolutionary steam is blown off by being allowed to talk about bad conditions. A loose grip has been shown to be more effective than a tight grip, when it comes to control.
Other governments are more strict, and it doesn't matter where you've been critical of them. If they can figure out who you are, and find out you said something on Lemmy that they think they can prosecute. Oh, they will, they will.
Can they censor Lemmy? Highly unlikely. It's decentralized and not owned by any one entity. Can they censor it from you? Maybe. Governments exerting control over internet access of their citizens is old hat
Regardless, like others have said, don't assume you're anonymous here.
Self host it. Now it not censored
No, the admins of communities and instances are the rulers here
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