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.
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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.
That said, don't just call people out who downvote you. No one owes you an explanation if they thought your post was bad. I've already seen it once and it was pretty childish.
So if one downvotes something and then removes that vote, does doing that removes it saying they downvoted or does it still keep it on record?
I had to run an experiment on this one.
It appears that changing you vote causes the old vote to be completely deleted from the database and a new vote cast and propagated.
Edit: The above description is what happens in the COMMENT_LIKE or POST_LIKE table HOWEVER the ACTIVITY table reflects both actions, which makes sense since it's a complete transaction log. So, it's a slightly more complex query but the history is maintained.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding here.
Our data has never been 'invisible'... We've just trusted that places like Reddit and their staff will do the right thing. That's literally how it already works.
If you sign up for Reddit, Reddit staff can see your posts and votes if they want to.
If you sign up for a private forum the admin there can also see database contents.
One way encryption is not possible without stopping functionality... If data about you was encrypted then posts you make couldn't be displayed. If you include a means to decrypt then there was no point encrypting anyway.
This is how it's always been, and Lemmy doesn't change this status quo much.
A faceless corporation that has had access to your data is just replaced by a variety of admins distributed across instances.
This isn't a good or bad thing, the potential for abuse does exist, but when we have literally made agreements with places like Reddit that they can use and sell our data... then what difference does it make it an admin takes a peek?
It wouldn't be great... but nothing is perfect.
It's still worth working on however, to see if a better solution can be found, but at this time I'd say just be aware that it is possible that your data can be seen and understand the only safeguard against that if you need to communicate something private would be to use direct messaging with end to end encryption.
Oh no, so my upvotes on c/spacedicks aren't private?
/s
So this is interesting... I thought only kbin visualized voting. Does this mean Lemmy's users are also tracked on kbin?
What about private messages? We should assume the person running the instance can read all private messages.
Yes. While I see no reason that private message would exist anywhere other than the instance of the sender and receiver, the admins of those instances CAN see the contents of the message and whether or not they have been read.
I've always assumed private messages on any site can be read by the site's admin unless they are end-to-end encrypted.
Is it just user activity that's public? Curious to know about what is preserved on the backend, like if user removed posts/etc get stored somewhere accessible like this too.
Deleted items just get marked as 'removed', the content remains in the database. I can see the comment you deleted on https://lemmy.world/post/955546.
Overwrites appear to replace the original content. I can see when you edited this comment but can't see what the edit was.