this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I signed up kbin.social but have since decided to go all in on Lemmy. I’ve tried all day to delete my account on kbin but it won’t let me. Once I click the delete confirmation pop up it simply reloads the feed and keeps your account.

Be warned. Currently you have no control over your data there. I think that settles it for me. I won’t be using that service again.

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bit of an overreaction, it's just that kbin is experiencing a lot of server issues and is insanely slow lately. Your request will probably go through later.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

100% this. I’ll bet you’ll find a bunch of failed requests in the inspector. Things are being hugged to death right now.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago

I’m willing to let them slide. Kbin and Lemmy are getting power slammed right now. Requests from clients aren’t going through properly and everything is being held together with duct tape and prayers.

If you find something weird, see if there is community / magazine that makes sense to report the bug to. I don’t think there is any ill intent happening right now. Shits just cracking under the extreme traffic load.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You don't control the data either way. Federation and deletion are in conflict. Even if you deleted the account, there is no guarantee it would be deleted from other servers that the data was copied to. (And to be clear, Lemmy has exactly the same issue.)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, you can't unsend an email either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

True, but I'll bet money someone will file some frivolous lawsuits at some point.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The key word there bring frivolous, and like 99% of frivolous lawsuits get tossed out rapidly and/or result in a ton of wasted money by the filer. Slapp only really work when you have a lot of money already to justify it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Against who?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Gdpr is not that easy, and the right to be forgotten is certainly more complicated than people are making it out to be. Public facing forum posts have even less protection, for fairly obvious reasons. Now if Lemmy instances were sharing your account information and not deleting that, it gets murkier.

Lemmy should probably keep gdpr and ccpa in mind but public facing forum comments are early qualified under the right to be forgotten unless they meet certain criteria.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do these regulations even apply in this case? Lemmy is non-commercial and it’s a distributed. Who would the regulators even go after?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The other point is, how do you know which instances to go after to delete any content anyways? I think there is a way to see a list of federated servers, but there’s no way to know which has your data.

In theory you could send a takedown request to each of them, but that doesn’t seem helpful

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Theoretically: the people hosting the instance you created an account with.

In practice: nobody is going to care

[–] ShadowAether 1 points 1 year ago

Not quite, stackoverflow doesn't delete your content if you file a GDPR request. Not all data is personal data.

[–] liontigerwings 18 points 1 year ago

I can't log in. I think it's just a server problem. You can't delete your account if the server can't be reached. Give it time.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Have you tried to contact the admins? Their servers are under immense load, it could be a problem related to that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

But then we couldn't bait

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is only one admin and it is also the only kbin developer.

Kbin is not ready, I'm sad to say.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

As I understand it, it's still a prototype, the dev didn't expect at all people would use it, that's why it's not ready yet for mass-adoption, tho I like how it's made, it has great potential IMO, it just needs time to get out of prototype phase.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Bud what makes you think you have any control of your data on any instance?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm sure it'd just a bug and will be fixed soon. Have you tried contacting the mods?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Jezebelley Kbin.social shows a small banner after requesting deletion. Whilst it is very unnoticeable, I believe it means the instance admin will have to manually remove content for now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thank you! I just noticed that. They have to manually delete the account as it just submits a request. Are you kidding me? What an inefficient system.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

One thing that definitely worries me with federation in general is the barrier to entry to hosting an instance is low, by design. On one hand this is great, but on the other hand it means just about anyone can spin up an instance and collect usernames, passwords, emails, etc. from anyone who signs up

I know this is obviously no better than an single giant corporation who can do that. But it's interesting to think about.

I'm definitely not suggesting kbin.social is doing this by the way. Your post just spurred this thought for me

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I am once again reminded of the always relevant XKCD comic

I do see and understand the concern, and honestly, I don't see a way around it. At some point, you have to supply some information to access services, especially if you want any sort of customization to your experience. I guess if you are really concerned about it, don't use that email/password/username combo anywhere else.

Edit: Apologies, I am still figuring out how formatting works here.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People should be using a password manager in 2023. No password reuse if you automatically generate new 20+ character passwords for each website or service you use.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed. I use 1Password and love it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I use Bitwarden, thinking about deploying a local copy of Vaultwarden as a backup as well. I’d be in trouble if access to Bitwarden’s servers went down.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Remember folks, use a password manager and get it to create a random strong password for every site you use

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I believe the passwords are stored as hashes, not sent directly to the server, at least I certainly hope so.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

They're sent directly to the server and stored as hashes. There's nothing stopping someone from logging the plaintext password, or removing the hash mechanism, though. Make sure to follow best practices and use a unique password on every website.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, this has been on my mind too. Certainly new instances shouldn’t be discouraged, and it helps lighten the load for all the other instances. At the same time, I personally am not sure I’d feel comfortable on a newer instance that doesn’t have a demonstrated history; Beehaw’s stated goals and origin (and having several admins in case one goes dark) helps reassure me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not sure about kbin but sign-up/account management on lemmy is kinda broken as well. For example lemmy.ml doesn't allow new users to sign up and when you try its just infinite loading with no visible response. Or on beehaw.org where you have to sign up and pray that you're accepted cause otherwise you're just ghosted. There's a long way ahead in terms of UX

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I'd imagine the servers were just overloaded. I'd give it some time and try again.

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