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?

  • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
    14·
    8 months ago

    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/