The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...
What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: Obligatory RIP my inbox.
Posts and comments is one thing... It's inherently public. But I think being able to see up and down vote publically is a tough pill. If you don't realize your votes can be seen you risk your vote being held against you. If you do know it disincentivizes you to use the vote system to protect yourself from something that should be rather benign.
At least you know the instance host isn’t selling your data right? The advertisers already have it 🤪
I was kind of joking, but now that I think about it isn’t that better? The problem isn’t really advertisers having your data, it’s companies doing skeezy things to be able to make more money with your data.
This way, instance hosts are free from that incentive and can just focus on making a good website.
Damn. That’s a tough pill to swallow.
I mean I didn't upvote or downvote porn on Reddit either. It's all personal information.
On Reddit there were plenty of people with access and the data was sold to advertisers.
Here it's public, not great but not terrible either. Also makes it easier to battle vote brigading?
It also makes it easier to profile users and weed out anyone who disagrees about literally anything.
Like, you guys need to consider not every admin is a paragon of virtue.
But that has always been a thing. Just like Reddit mods banning you from their subreddit just because you posted in another subreddit they didn't like. It sucks, but it's nothing new.
If either a server admin or a community mod doesn't like you for what you're doing, they can kick you out. It's the same as if this was an old time forum and you pissed off the admin.
With lemmy you have to watch two things:
Trust the instance admin you sign up with, this is where your account data lives, the admin can read everything on your account. Hell, even your password if they manipulated the instance code, so use a random one
Trust the moderators of the communities you interact with. If you interact with a community and the mods there don't like you, they can just remove your posts for example. Same as with Reddit
A random person outside of your instance or communities you interact with can't do much. They can "steal" your posts and comment data and see your votes. But that's it. They can't block your account or kick you out of your favorite communities. They could obviously harass you (just your account, not your email), but then you can block them. Or ask the admin to block their entire instance.
That's my only concern. I don't mind my comments to be public. That's what a public place is, unlike other social media platforms who claim to be but they're not. It's, like you mentioned, the upvote/downvote system that I'm worried about and will refrain from using. Because it is public, too, it feels like it lets people read your thoughts. So, I'll refrain from using it until it's fixed.