Oh really I thought it would be the other way around where private companies always keep a copy and fediverses don’t 😅
If you upload an image from your browser, there’s a little popup in the corner for a few seconds that allows you to delete it again. No such thing exists in the apps though and if you miss the popup, that’s it.
Isn’t this in violation of the gdpr?
If that were the case, wouldn’t the entire Fediverse be against it? Since they can’t really be deleted because it gets sent everywhere.
Yes and no.
let’s say I have a website that hosts user generated content like a forum or something. Some other person just hosts a mirror of my website that is not under my control. If some user requests me to delete his data, I can do that. i cannot delete the data from the mirror site.
Nothing else is happening in the fediverse. The only difference is, that in the fediverse the license and technology is set up to encourage mirroring content.
While being compliant with GDPR depends on the instance that pulls your data (which is the premise), the Fediverse isn’t in any way close to being private if you can’t delete your own data everywhere.
“Traditional” social media is not meant to be private, what you post always has been public knowledge, and stays that way.
So use a chat app if you want private social media, like signal story.
Things you post publicly online just aren’t private
While I don’t disagree with what you say, it’s always safe to assume that once something had been online, anybody can copy/screenshot the content.
I suspect it is the case.
The issue doesn’t seem to be the Fediverse itself, rather the fact that images uploaded to Lemmy are handled in a separate program that isn’t linked to it in a way you can delete from by just deleting posts. The images aren’t marked as owned by you, so can’t be deleted again. You’d need some way of storing those image deletion tokens against your account, so you can manage them yourself and be able to delete them again.
And this would have to include images that you uploaded and didn’t make a post about. As far as I can tell they’re just left there on the server forever. Not even sure if it tells you which user uploaded it, although it might log by IP address. I haven’t looked too deeply into the code but there’s potential for abuse there.
Dear aussie.zone users,
I can delete photos. Just give me the url of the photo you need killed and I’ll happily delete it for you. But also, don’t (accidentally) upload a nude.
But won’t answer DMs about an instance bug where being temp banned from one community functions as an instance wide ban
Assuming it’s not a joke that flew over my head, how could any individual instance remove the images once replicated? Is the removal from the original instance cascaded?
There’s no technical reason you can’t delete an image that’s been replicated. There’s an API to replicate the data, there can also be apis to delete the replicas (and apparently there are?)
It is my understanding that images are never federated and always reference from the source instance… But, the text is fully federated.
That’s not true, images are also copied over. This is also for efficiency reasons and to spread the load of the image out to the servers. Sometimes you’ll see images not being copied to your own instance, but that might be because your instance has a lower image size limit than the instance it was uploaded to originally.
If you ask the instance admin nicely, they might delete it for you, with a small risk of taking down the instance if they mess with
pictrswrong.How exactly does Lemmy remain in compliance with laws regarding, for example, a user’s right to have all data associated with their account deleted (right to erasure, etc), or ensure that it is only kept for a time period reasonable while the user is actively using your services (data protection retention periods, etc)?
It’s not a big deal for me, just strange to think Lemmy of all places would be built to be so anti user’s data rights. The user is ultimately the one that decides what is done with their information/property, after all.
GDPR only applies to businesses with more than 250 employees of which none of the Lemmy instances are.
GDPR does not depend on business size, there are just a few stricter requirements when you have more than 250 employees. But most of the GDPR still applies to my knowledge.
GDPR is a business regulation that applies to businesses. Lemmy development and hosting are not businesses, they are private non organizational servers used for personal purposes where data collection isn’t part of the business at all. What is the mechanism in the EU for suing private individuals without a registered business or VAT number? Please review the enforcement https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ for private individuals and find one that is from someone who wasn’t involved in a criminal case. If you cooperate with the authorities they won’t sue you.
Uhuh, suuureeeee. Tell that to any number of fines that has yearly been issued by my country’s GDPR oversight agency on ordinary citizens.
GDPR only applies when people file reports and when there are lawsuits. There’s literally no shortage of articles of people fined for GDPR violations, all people need to do is search for them.
When someone files the inevitable court case, please let me know. I have some admin behavior bullshit I will be willing to personally get in contact with the lawyers about that I think could help it.
And you don’t have to respond to them if you aren’t a business with more than 250 employees. It is in the regulation itself. All you need to do is search the text.
What company runs Lemmy? The answer is none. They are neither a small or medium sized enterprise as defined by the GDPR. Is collecting data part of their core business? No. https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rules-business-and-organisations/application-regulation/who-does-data-protection-law-apply_en
If your company is a small and medium-sized enterprise (‘SME’) that processes personal data as described above you have to comply with the GDPR. However, if processing personal data isn’t a core part of your business and your activity doesn’t create risks for individuals, then some obligations of the GDPR will not apply to you
You confuse things. Just read: https://www.compliancejunction.com/gdpr-guideline-for-companies-with-less-than-250-employees/
If you think that your company can simply ignore the introduction of the GDPR and continue as before, well, think again. Any company that is found not to be complying with regulations of GDPR can be penalized with heavy fines, or a company may have to suspend or stop processing personal data. In fact, many companies are not yet ready for GDPR because they figure this legislation will not influence their company.
DPR compliance is as important for companies with less than 250 employees as it is for large multi-national corporations. Consequently, many companies have chosen to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO) to address to the GDPR requirements or appoint a consultancy company to get their GDPR preparations started before delegating the role to an existing employee. For further information about this option, please refer to our article “Do Small Companies Need to Appoint a DPO under GDPR?”
Not sure how you think individual people can get fined under the GDPR but companies with less than 250 employees can’t. This is just about the only exemption:
Article 30 of GDPR is about a data inventory record and provides one potential exception for Organisations with less than 250 employees. This is a limited exemption which states that Organisations with less than 250 employees may be exempt from maintaining a data Inventory or record of processing activities. This Exemption is a minor exemption and only applies for Organisations with less than 250 employees in certain circumstances where there is no processing that is likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of data subjects, the processing is only occasional, excludes special categories of personal data and personal data related to criminal convictions. The Full text of Article 30 is below. This limited exemption should in no means be interpreted by Organisations with less than 250 employees as an authorisation to ignore overall GDPR Compliance.
The lemmy devs are not a company, they do not have employees and they are not a registered business. It is a private hobby project run by donations. Lemmy.world, run by a person Ruud, again, not a business, they have no employees.
Doesn’t matter. Lemmy instances are technically “entities” so the law applies to them. You don’t have to be a business, just “anything that processes EU citizen’s personal data”.
citizen
Actually I believe it’s “residents”. You don’t need to be a citizen.
It doesn’t though lol, they don’t collect PII as part of their business. There is no business. They would have to actually get investigated, not cooperative then sued. None of the enforcements that weren’t criminal ever amounted to anything, all the major fines are criminal cases. you can actually check https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ sort by Private Individual.
In no cases are the lemmy devs responsible for this or “fucked up” per the article. Ruud, the sysadmin of lemmy.world could be sued but would have to be non cooperative and involved in a criminal case.
… At this point, you realize you are just grasping at straws, right? And ones you are seriously misunderstanding, given your previous less than 250 employees statement.
It’s not much, but I would advice you to read the second answer here, https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/29052/do-web-applications-as-hobby-projects-need-to-comply-with-the-gdpr , and seriously think about whether a site with many more users and much more personal data, specially those receiving revenue streams in the form of donations and with a team made up of more than one person https://team.lemmy.world/ , would be more or less likely to be accountable to the GDPR under a court of law than a personal blog.
Ruud should probably be getting in contact with https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/contact/informatie-en-meldpunt-privacy-imp or on the telephone Monday to Thursday from 10 a.m. to 12 noon on 088-1805250 if he hasn’t already.
Because Federation is a terrible idea
But think of Reddit, they can delete a post but a bunch of archived websites will still have it. That doesn’t make Reddit non-compliant
Why is federation bad? It’s the only way to decentralize without having everyone scattered across millions of sites.
The days prior to 2014 are gone and for the most part, the overwhelming majority of people don’t want to register across dozens of sites. Everyone naturally gravitates toward massive content silos where they can get everything in one place.
For the health of the internet you want people scattered across millions of websites
And the need for regulations that limit active users isn’t a reason to contribute further to the problem
Preventing congregation weakens the effectiveness of disinformation and propaganda campaigns, and protects against bullying
For the health of the internet you want people scattered across millions of websites
I don’t understand this point. Federation brings everyone together. I don’t understand why it’s bad for everyone to spread out.
Preventing congregation weakens the effectiveness of disinformation and propaganda campaigns, and protects against bullying
This is a contradiction. This is an argument for having everyone decentralized rather then together in massive content silos.
Lemmy is not a singular software or website, every instance on its own need to ensure compliance with their respective laws where they are domiciled.
But if instance A is domiciled in the EU, and the content mirrored to instance B in Zimbabwe, where no right to be forgotten exists, then a user of instance A can’t invoke any laws beyond what the local admin can control.
That’s amazing for high availability of content - it’s essentially mirrored in perpetuity - but a nightmare for privacy advocates. AFAIK there haven’t been any court cases related to deletion requests, so that’s still virgin territory.
Instances located in Zimbabwe still have to comply with the GDPR, as the law applies to any entity that processes EU citizen’s personal data, regardless of where this happens. Instance B would also have to comply with a deletion request, or whatever EU member state the citizen is from will impose a fine and seize assets if necessary.
This is the stupidest claim GDPR makes. It’s completely unenforceable and it’s attempting to enforce EU law in countries outside of the EU, which goes completely against any norms in international relations.
I don’t see how it could be enforced without this. If you are operating internationally, comply or block your service from regions you cannot legally operate in.
Personally I don’t think Lemmy should comply. It’s an ad free community service with zero PII obligation besides an email and whatever IP you choose to connect from. No one has to be on Lemmy for any common social obligations.
If you want to be forgotten then leave!
If you are operating internationally, comply or block your service from regions you cannot legally operate in.
Couple of problems with this. First, it’s putting the onus on a company that does not operate in Europe to figure out what European law is and to try to comply with it. Why should they have to do that? If you’re not operating in an area, you should not have to ever give any consideration whatsoever to the laws of that area.
The second is that, unless I’m misinformed, the EU claims its law applies to any EU citizen, regardless of location. Which means if a Dutch person moves to Australia and uses Australian companies’ services, the EU says “hey, Australian company, you gotta do what this Dutch person says with their data”. Which is utterly ridiculous.
It absolutely is enforceable, and the EU has already enforced it several times.
The EU can of course try to seize assets, but in many cases they have signed a treaty with other countries stating they have the right to enforce the GDPR within their borders. Think a bit in the sense of an extradition treaty. For the US, this is the EU-US Data Privacy Framework for example.
This means the EU absolutely can, will and has the means to enforce the GDPR abroad.
What happens when you share a link to an image? Does Lemmy just save the link or does it make a copy of the image?
The link. It only saves the image if you upload it directly, since converting it to a link, and embedding the link is how Lemmy handles image uploads.
I’m a developer of a Lemmy client. When you upload an image to a Lemmy instance, the instance returns a “delete token”. Later, you can ask the instance to delete the image attached to the delete token. So as long as you keep hold of the delete token for a specific image, you’re able to delete it later.
Lemmy-ui (the official frontend) will give you the option to delete an image again shortly after uploading it. However, it’s not possible to remove the image after actually creating the post, as the delete token isn’t stored anywhere on the backend.
As for other Lemmy clients, YMMV. The client I work on (Mlem) deletes images if you remove them from a post before posting it, but has the same pitfall as Lemmy-ui in that it won’t delete the image if you’ve already created the post.
It would be possible to locally save the delete tokens of every image you upload, so that you can request that they be removed later. I don’t know of any clients that can do this yet, though (if someone knows of one, feel free to mention it).
as the delete token isn’t stored anywhere on the backend.
Backend of the app or the lemmy server? if it is not stored on the lemmy server then there will be no way to delete it even if the app stores the token.
Also using a singular token that never expires to modify user content sounds like a bad idea. image operations like upload and delete should probably tied to the user credentials.
Backend of the app or the lemmy server? if it is not stored on the lemmy server then there will be no way to delete it even if the app stores the token.
Apologies, I worded that badly. Lemmy uses an image hosting service called pictrs to manage the images you upload, which is largely separated from the rest of the Lemmy backend. Pictrs of course stores the delete tokens matching each image, but Lemmy doesn’t associate those tokens with the posts or comments they originated from as far as I know.
That makes sense, probably why image deletion was so hard on lemmy.
You can consider almost anything publicly posted to Lemmy as permanent. As I keep saying, please be careful.
I do think a way to automatically store the uploaded image urls and associated delete keys under your user is a necessary feature.
For personal image hosting I use postimage, but any external host that lets you modify/remove images under your account will do.
You can consider almost anything publicly posted to
Lemmythe internet as permanentFTFY
Excuse me, there was an internet beyond Lemmy?!? /s
Welcome to the hell of being a lemmy admin. There’s a reason why lemmy admins are fed up with the developers.
Not sure I understand. How could there possibly be a solution? Isn’t this an inherent problem with federation? You can’t un-share information
But you can delete your copy, ask others nicely to delete theirs, and refuse to accept more copies of the same thing.
I’m not sure if Lemmy supports any of this, but it seems pretty important for e.g. child porn.
How can you refuse to accept more copies of the same thing, when you deleted all the version it can compare itself to?
When you get a deletion request, hash the bytes and store the hash.
There could be a legally binding contract stating that any deletion request must be forwarded to all parties it was send to, and that upon receiving such a request the data must be deleted. I do not think this would be unreasonable to ask to servers, especially as this deletion receipt could be fully automated.
legally binding contract
Maybe, but consider that federated servers may be located in entirely different legal jurisdictions, so this might be hard to create, let alone enforce.
Or there could be a delay of one minute before posts get federated, giving the user the option to quickly delete a comment or post.
The images aren’t federated afaik. They live on your home instance. If somebody else views them, they’re loaded directly from there.
However there’s no link between the images and your account. You can’t delete them yourself because Lemmy doesn’t store the “delete token”. They’re effectively orphaned.
Not true, images are federated. Sometimes they are not copied if your instance has a lower image size limit than the instance the image came from (if the image is too large), but generally images are copied between instances.
I did check a few embedded images, and they still seemed to be served from the original. So I dunno. Maybe they’re copied and still served from the original, which would be an odd thing to do.
Aah the embedded ones in comments? Yes to my knowledge those aren’t federated. But pictures posted as posts will be federated.
For context, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes when it comes to lemmy admin stuff especially in the matrix channels. There is a significant frustration and lack of confidence in the lemmy developers at this point. Even those who try to contribute to the project get eventually feeling pushed out.
Based on what I’ve seen on the public facing part of the developer side, I get the feeling this isn’t the kind of group that can build the kind of organization required to make this sustainable in the long run.
I’m just waiting for when Beehaw releases that they’ve given up on Lemmy and have created a new tech stack.
In terms of new tech stack currently theres sublinks being made by devs/admins of a bunch of instances (discuss.online, lemmy.world, programming.dev, etc.)
Anything public yet and are they sticking to Rust?
Java spring for backend, Go for federation, Next.js for frontend
demo.sublinks.org has the backend with the lemmy-ui frontend to show api compatibility
Task list and progress is public on the github org https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1
Matrix space where all the devs talk is also public and you can see progress talked about in them
Not really a substantial opinion, but I have little hope that replacing a fairly well established Rust codebase with a brand new Java one will do much in terms of increasing contribution.
Who knows. Java is a much bigger programming language than Rust. Might be easier to find developers. But obviously it depends on interest. Who knows.
I wouldn’t shortchange how much making the barrier to entry lower can help. You have to fight Rust a lot to build anything complex, and that can have a chilling effect on contributions. This is not a dig at Rust; it has to force you to build things in a particular way because it has to guarantee memory safety at compile time. That isn’t to say that Rust’s approach is the only way to be sure your code is safe, mind you, just that Rust’s insistence on memory safety at compile time is constraining.
To be frank, this isn’t necessary most of the time, and Rust will force you to spend ages worrying about problems that may not apply to your project. Java gets a bad rap but it’s second only to Python in ease-of-use. When you’re working on an API-driven webapp, you really don’t need Rust’s efficiency as much as you need a well-defined architecture that people can easily contribute to.
I doubt it’ll magically fix everything on its own, but a combo of good contribution policies and a more approachable codebase might.
Theres been a bunch of activity and people joining in in the dev matrix already
Backend pretty much already has parity and the frontend is currently the main thing that an updated demo is waiting on but should be ready really soon
I’ve been designing an updated home page recently for it that I’ll be pushing out this week that looks miles better than lemmy-ui since I could do everything from scratch and thus quickly
There’s also Kbin, I suppose.
It’s a somewhat similar story there, although the devs aren’t as difficult. Mbin is a fork and seems to be the codebase with the brightest future.
Do they have an API yet?
We already have Sublinks
It’s open source. We don’t have to depend on the original developers.
If it gets too bad, someone can just make a fork.
Afaik people are just impatient with the developers and have different short term goals.
I mention a new tech stack because Beehaw brought it up as an option and a lot of people have commented on the difficulty of development in this environment.
That’d be disappointing. Rust seems like a great foundation.
Rust seems like a great foundation.
The fact that I know you’re referring to the programming language called “Rust” doesn’t make this sentence any less funny.
It could still be rust. Code is always the easy part. Design and organization and funding are hard
What about kbin, isn’t that entirely different software that can be developed to phase out Lemmy?
From what I heard Kbin’s developer is very inactive, so people started a fork called Mbin. Mbin might be alright?
That sucks. As a 3rd party Lemmy app developer, I’ve only had positive interactions with the Lemmy devs. They’re even being proactive in communications.
Are they open to these discussions?
Try submitting a pull request for something in one of the core repos.
They behave as if every line of code in your commit is a sentence proclaiming “Why yes, your wife is a whore, your dog doesn’t love you, AND your baby is ugly.”
I’m not kidding, there’s no hyperbole in that statement. Go read some of their declined pull requests threads for some entertainment.
Even those who try to contribute to the project get eventually feeling pushed out.
Submitting a pull request to one of their repos on Github was really an experience, and I can tell you that I will never submit another one to the Lemmy project while they’re still the lead devs based on that experience.
That’s kind of the impression I got but thought maybe I was just mistaken because I haven’t actually been hands-on with this project. That’s unfortunate to hear.
Might be worth heeding with anything else sensitive too. Like bank details, emails etc. Dont dox yourself.
hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars ********* see!
I’ve posted a selfie and cat pics.
I am unimportant and have little to steal. Though if someone starts shooting at me for paraphrasing far left theory, I’ll know I hit a nerve.
Don’t underestimate your own worth, everyone has something of at least little importance, because even someone “worthless” can be worth a lot to the right people.
That’s why it’s very important to be careful what you share.
It’s not about if you’re important or not, it’s about if you become important to someone.
I can’t upload any image so I’m way ahead of you
How? I want to block my app from being able to upload images.
Join lemm.ee and you would be golden
oh, I got too excited. The instance sidebar says image uploads are available 4 weeks after account creation, though :(
Let me try sending you something
Edit: I got error 413 that I don’t have that functionality. Don’t you see it can never be.
Are you asking?😉😉
maybe we all are? 😵
How hard can it be to fix?
Well, the first thing a server does with your image is to send it to a lot of other, completely unrelated servers.
That’s not quite true - images are only shared if you attach the image to federated content, such as a post or comment. Then yes other instances will cache the image.
If you never do that, and just upload an image accidentally like OP then it will not be federated AFAIK.
