I know how to deal with doxxing on traditional social media. I either report the comment or delete my comment, and if the platform doesn’t have moderators I trust, then I don’t use it.
But on the fediverse, anyone on any instance can reveal some personal information and it has to be deleted on every instance in order to be cleared for everyone. Any joe shmoe can spin up an instance, post your personal details (or personal details they made up), and bada bing bada boom, your identity is compromised forever.
I don’t trust the admins of sites like Reddit and Facebook very much, but I trust them a lot more than the instance admin of lemmy.eightyeight.nazi, or whatever other instance run by people who want to hurt me for who I am. And what if an admin is just busy and just doesn’t have time to check reports, or it’s an unmoderated instance run by an admin who gave up on Lemmy but didn’t unplug their server?
Do I have to trust every single person on the internet with basic server admin knowledge in order to use the fediverse?
- Don’t expect privacy. Everything you post is public.
- Goto 1
We’re talking about doxxing, which is private information posted against the person’s will, not necessarily by the person themselves. You can get doxxed even if you do everything right.
Yeah, not much you can do about it apart from the things outlined in the OP.
A nazi dickhed running pleroma on his rapsberry pie isn’t going to respect federation moderation messages, DMCA or GDPR. You can try to complain to their ISP, but chances that someone is reading the abuse mailbox and acts on it is… slim.
So act like there’s no privacy at all.
So using Lemmy with an established username or any other identifying characteristic is just a giant threat to my personal safety?
Yeah, if that kind of thing is part of your threat model.
The tools to protect users on fedi are a bag of shit (partly due to the federated nature of it all, but also due to the fact that no one really thought about “what to do about abuse”).
Yup!
Even if you dont use lemmy or other websites your information can still be posted there by someone who wants to do that
There should be a reputation score or something for instances. We all like freedom but there’s also gotta be boundaries and consequences.
I think it might have been an idea to make instance federation to default into a whitelist instead of relying on everyone having to blacklist random raspberry pies around the world.
Any joe shmoe can spin up an instance, post your personal details (or personal details they made up), and bada bing bada boom, your identity is compromised forever.
Replace “instance” with “website” and that’s how the internet works. There are avenues in the legal system to combat this, but generally people can post speech (illegal or not) very easily with the internet, having rapid, free, open communication is a net positive for society even if occasionally there are downsides.
Lemmy can’t solve doxxing or other forms of abuse any better than a centralized service can, which they don’t do particularly well as it is. What Lemmy does do it put control over what content is promoted into the hands of users and instance admins, as opposed to a few execs at Meta. If an instance has poor moderation, it will be ‘de-federated’ by other lemmy instances, which means content from their instance won’t travel across the fediverse. So in general, I think you can expect good moderation. Unlike centralized services, instance admins are not incentivized to shove polarizing content and misinformation into your feed. That pipeline of increasingly polarizing content is the root cause of many situations which involve doxxing in the first place.
I don’t care so much if my personal info is posted to a website like kiwifarms or someone’s private blog, because those websites are harder to find in search results and will only be reached by people who already have intent to do harm. It’s called security through obscurity. It’s not a good thing if info gets leaked on these sites, but it’s a more manageable problem. They’d have to go to a more public website in order to leak it to strangers, and that’s when I could do something about it. Big companies have a desire to protect themselves from prosecution for hosting illegal activity. They specifically hire people to moderate content and reduce their liability.
Karen Doe isn’t thinking about lawsuits or liability, and she probably doesn’t have a good grasp of the legal system. But she can run a Lemmy instance that will federate with the entire rest of the fediverse and expose her content to potentially thousands of people. And getting Karen Doe off the main parts of the fediverse requires I make a personally persuasive argument to EVERY large instance owner, most of whom are volunteers, aren’t paid, and don’t really care. Some of them don’t even like me as a person to begin with, because they’re right wing and I’m trans. They might have me banned or blocked. So what am I supposed to do about Karen?
I don’t care so much if my personal info is posted to a website like kiwifarms or someone’s private blog, because those websites are harder to find in search results
So is most of Lemmy
Big companies have a desire to protect themselves from prosecution for hosting illegal activity.
So do Lemmy instance hosters, the hosting companies they use, and the other instances which federate with them.
They specifically hire people to moderate content and reduce their liability.
Once can expect lemmy instances to do this once they reach a certain size. If you don’t moderate sufficiently, you get de-federated, and your users won’t want to use your instance, so lemmy instances which want to grow will keep a handle on good moderation,
But she can run a Lemmy instance that will federate with the entire rest of the fediverse and expose her content to potentially thousands of people.
If she posts it to a lemmy community the mod that community or instance will remove it. If she hosts her own instance for the purposes of doxxing people nobody will even see the post (since it’s not getting upvoted across fedi) and other instances will de-federate.
Ultimately, if you are at high risk of doxxing, the best measures to protect yourself are mostly based not around which platforms you trust or not, but around engaging with those platforms in a way which protects your privacy. Might want to check out the surveillance self-defense guide. https://ssd.eff.org/
Even on Reddit there are mirror websites designed to preserve deleted content, and there’s also the internet archive and Google cache, screenshots, etc.
Once information is posted online it’s available. It can be obfuscated or loosely scrubbed, but you can never know it’s clean.
A personal instance generally doesn’t have a big reach, unless people actively follow the person who’s posting the doxxing information.* The fediverse may not be a good way to spread personal information of others, throwing up an instance like that is not much different than throwing up a website or forum.
There’s two things I can think of you can do: Contact the company that hosts the website to take it down – I’m unsure about how you go about this, but I’m sure you can find out more about that. And to report the instance to other instance admins to get it blacklisted, perhaps get it on a block list, limiting its reach and thus effectiveness. Get in contact with big instance admins, they likely have chatrooms you could join, and they might be able to help with the other step as well.
*edit: In the case of Lemmy, I suppose it would be people following a community, rather than a user directly. If moderators or admins act on the posted informated and delete it, the deletion will federate as well and any legitimate instance will automatically delete the content on their servers as well. This would also be true for Mastodon and such. If not, the above applies.
I don’t have a habit of sharing identifiable information on the internet, but that goes doubly true here.
While using another instance, the one with the bee theme, I deleted a comment that I made sometime sooner. Out of curiosity I checked that same thread from the other instances, and there was one where my comment was still showing up.
Now, that comment wasn’t anything special. I said something wrong and found out later, so I deleted it.
But what this means is that, if I share something I shouldn’t, I don’t trust that every instance will delete my comment.
- Don’t post personal information
- use throwaways
- don’t take the strangers you communicate with, as trustworthy friends
The problem with the fediverse in that regard is that it’s basically multicasted. On one hand that’s a negative for the reasons you’ve said, but on the other hand it means you can easily dig up information that moderators and admins acting in bad faith can hide and then claim whatever bullshit they want.
Ultimately, you really shouldn’t be seeking privacy in lemmy and should try to refrain from using information that can personally identify you if you are really afraid or really incapable of having a public presence. If someone tries to dox you, they could dox you from any website. If they do, the way to proceed with that is usually filling out a police complaint form and/or any other specialized agency in your country block that can deal with it, or if you have the money, to get in contact with a lawyer which usually makes it about who has the biggest bank.
However, we also have to understand what is being called doxing. In your case, I understand its someone pointing out an alt that had apparently posted content word for word. Doxing generally involves things like the SWAT showing up and assaulting your home or people messing up your personal life by making personal data public for misuse. I’m not sure how noting similarities to try to imply that you should also be banned applies here.
And trust me, I’m in a very similar situation, except it involves an admin committing libel just because I complained about them where people who complain about them also have, ergo I must be whatever the worst shit that he can throw at me and get to stick is, which apparently has been that I’m an alt of an account who is a pedophile on another server. Not only that, they didn’t even mind including and leaving several links to an external server spread out through several comments that they claim hosts the pedophilia with the implication that people go there and check it out for themselves to confirm an association to the person they were accusing. Implied because, well, they are just leaving the link there without any real explanation, which might mean a user on a “No porn” instance could also randomly click on it if they are careless.
Going after libel is pretty shit, you can’t really do anything about it, but I have reported the links to what is by their own words pedophilia to the appropriate organizations because that’s far more serious and I’m sure not going to sort through that shit. But would I call it doxing? Well, besides the fact that the claim is false, no, sometimes libel is just libel, and sometimes linking to CSAM for any reason is still linking to CSAM. Looking at this, some lawyers do claim it is when it is tracking multiple usernames, although I imagine it might involve associating accounts with personal identifying information.
Doing it isn’t necessarily wrong but should be limited to gathering information to report to law enforcement agencies to help with their investigations, if it’s something more than casual speculation. In communities where the community itself can be considered an extension of the authority, the issue limited to it, where transparency is valued, and where the information itself isn’t really that personally identifying, well, the circumstances seem different. Frankly, I think an abuse of authority is worse than doxing in such an environment, specially in a social network where you control the flow of communication. If that’s your case, you should probably be calling that out instead.
Thanks for all of that, that really sucks. Also that other person is not me, and you’ll note that Ada claims a deleted comment as evidence, because nobody can actually check a deleted comment and prove she’s full of shit.
The harassment is for sure incontrovertible, but nobody seems to give a shit about that. I wouldn’t have a problem if I could just erase the rumours that are being said to others and encouraging others to harass me.
