this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
16 points (69.0% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26831 readers
2188 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I came here for the same reasons as most of you and chiefly among them was to escape the corporate embrace of common social media platforms.

But how much trust can we place into Lemmy, Mastodon, and/or other various integrated Fediverse platform instances?

I'm all for open-source and transparency which the devs seem to provide, although providing source code and routinely audited source code are entirely different concepts.

Similarly, the high availability of source code may lead to malicious instances, actors, and/or back-end modifications that would favor specific instances resounding consequence throughout the Fediverse.

So I ask simply: How much faith do you have? (Please provide supporting documentation links supporting your answer because I'm genuinely interested.)

EDIT: I literally removed a semi-colon character ':'

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Zak@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

What do you mean by "trust"?

Do I trust that vanilla Lemmy code doesn't contain something nefarious, such as code that detects political positions it doesn't like and reduces their visibility? Sure. It would be hard to hide something like that.

Do I trust that major servers aren't secretly running software that manipulates content? Mostly yes. I think it would get noticed since there are lots of vanilla servers to compare behavior to.

Do I trust that all the software is well-designed and bug-free? I write software for a living. No software is bug-free and most of it isn't well-designed.

Do I trust that everyone who runs a fediverse server isn't an asshole? Absolutely not. Any jackass can run a server. I run a Mastodon server (on which all users are me).

[–] BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How can people join your mastodon?

I also choose this guy's Mastodon server

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

They can be my really close friends or family and ask me for an account, which I would actively discourage (join something well-run like .world) but eventually allow if they really wanted to.