• orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts
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    1 year ago

    Lemmy is a massive collection of separate servers and communities run by people. Therefore no government has a hold on it. I’m a guy that pays money out of his own pocket monthly to run a Lemmy server. If the government is controlling it, that’s news to me, and my comment history is pretty damn anti-government.

    The whole point of decentralization is to remove control from the corporations and governments, and put it back into the hands of the people.

  • Wooster@startrek.website
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    1 year ago

    While governments can’t directly manipulate Lemmy, you should still operate on the assumption that nothing you do here is anonymous.

      • taanegl@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        They could, but they won’t. The threat model is low because McCarthyism is over and done with. Your CIA agent however sees your posts and is very disappointed with you.

  • FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “The government”? You’re going to need to be more specific, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of governments.

    That said, each instance of Lemmy is run differently, some are more restricted than others but “the government” wouldn’t really have anything to do with administration unless it was hosting the instance or the person hosting it was acting on behalf of “the government” (aside from the laws that govern the location of the instance’s host, of course).

    • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      Whether I agree with you or not, technically, it is still censorship. Censorship is the limitations and restrictions on the freedom of expression, for example, prohibiting the publication of threats of violence is still a restriction on freedom of expression. It just happens to be censorship you agree with - that does not counteract the fact that it is censorship.

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I think technically censorship is the editing of the content, not a system of consequences for the content. Traditionally censors operate in the publication pipeline, taking articles as input and providing new articles as output.

        There’s information suppression, which can include both censorship and silencing of voices, which is what I’d call what you’re referring to.

        • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          Censorship usually is taken to mean the suppression of speech or writing. If you’re legally prohibited from saying or writing something, you’re being censored, by definition.

          Where are you getting your definition of censorship as meaning content being edited?

          • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            From the fact that “censors” were people stationed at newspapers in the 20th century, doing what I said.

            • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
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              1 year ago

              The term predates that usage by well over 2000 years. Roman censors would essentially punish people for immoral behaviour by taking away their rights or by reducing their status in some way - for example, punishing them for speaking out of turn or publishing offensive material.

      • CeruleanRuin@lemmings.world
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        1 year ago

        This is a pedantic view of the language that doesn’t add much to the conversation. When a normal person talks about censorship, they mean speech that isn’t direct threats or divulging of information that everyone understands to be dangerous in the wrong hands - like personal information or state secrets, like, say, what the nuclear codes are.

        Of course there are exceptions to everything, but we all understand what “censorship” means, and squashing calls for assassinations or other violence is not it.

        • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          See, what you’re having trouble with here is that you don’t want to support censorship, even though you do. You don’t like the connotations, so you find some excuse that makes it more comfortable for you. It’s cowardly and dishonest. The word means what it means. Call me a pedant, tell me I’m not adding to the conversation, I don’t care. You’re still supporting censorship whether you want to wear that label or not.

  • cosmic_slate@dmv.social
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    1 year ago

    I nominate this thread for “sketchiest question on Lemmy”.

    In all seriousness, at the end of the day, the legal side of this hasn’t been thoroughly tested. I would personally err on the side of caution and abide by the stricter of the laws between your country and your instance’s country. If either prohibit criticism of government, you may run into issues depending on the combination of countries. It’s safe to assume instance owners don’t have a gigantic legal fund either, so they may be more easily forced to give up access logs which could be used to trace you.

    There’s also the forever unsaid “don’t be a dick” clause. If a country prohibits some form of speech, don’t intentionally try to get instance owners in that country in trouble.

    • treadful@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      In all seriousness, at the end of the day, the legal side of this hasn’t been thoroughly tested.

      Sure it has. There’s nothing overly novel going on here with Lemmy or ActivityPub. There are servers that host instances which host content. If they exist within the jurisdiction of country N, then said laws and government have some level of influence on it. Unless it’s hosted in like Sealand or some lawless place with terrible Internet connection, which is super unlikely.

      If your instance is hosted in the US, the federal government can still get subpoena access under the PATRIOT ACT and put the owner under gag and we’d never know.

      • fishos@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If your instance is hosted in the US, the federal government can still get subpoena access under the PATRIOT ACT and put the owner under gag and we’d never know.

        Which is why all instance owners need to implement some form of digital canary.

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    1 year ago

    You’re 100% not anonymous. On Lemmy it’s trivial to see who you are. If your activities put you in danger from your local authorities, lemmy is going to be very dangerous for you.

    Let’s suppose your documenting human rights abuses in authoritarian country A. You post that documentation to a local Lemmy instance. That instance is federated. Your post makes it across the lemme verse. All is good. But repressive government A wants to kill that post. So they Target the original Lemmy instance, and all of the users using it, that they can exert control over. They may not know a specifically you, but an authoritarian government would have no problem talking to everybody using that instance.

    If you’re in danger from local authorities, you need to use more than just Lemmy. Use tor, using anonymous VPN, follow the EFFs guide for investigative journalists.

    https://ssd.eff.org/

    • Nath@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      I’m sorry, what?

      We are not a big instance, but there is no way on earth we are handing any details of our users to some foreign government. It would actually be against Australian law to do that if we even wanted to.

      Hell, we don’t even know anything about our users. Most of them have provided an email. That’s literally all we know about them.

      • jet@hackertalks.com
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        1 year ago

        An oppressive government doesn’t need your cooperation, they can simply monitor the traffic and see who’s connecting to your instance from their country. Especially if the user isn’t using a VPN. Some governments are in the habit of logging all internet traffic, maybe not the data itself, but the flow information. So then they just look at who from their country was connected to your instance at the time of this post. And it becomes fairly easy for them to backtrack responsibility

        If it happens to be the government of the location of the server, they can physically take it and take the logs.

        If the country of the servers location, and the oppressive government have legal agreements, it could be part of a criminal investigation which gives up the users information, or civil discovery.

        Lemmy is decentralized, which is great, but it is not anonymous.

        Not to mention the Mosaic theory of information discovery, most users are probably outing themselves through all of their posts. If they post frequently. Especially if you have domestic information sources, you can take photos find locations, take all the constraints from all their posts and find a fingerprint for the person. You could do it for me. I’ve outed enough information from my posts where you can find who I am if you have enough ancillary data.

        • Nath@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          Our servers sit behind cloudfront, the same as half the Internet. All that foreign government will see is cloudfront traffic. That won’t tell them much. I don’t think Amazon will give out their data to some foreign government easily either, since that’s their whole business model.

          It isn’t as trivial to identify a user from their metadata as you seem to be saying.

          • jet@hackertalks.com
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            1 year ago

            I stand behind my advice.

            Especially because the OP is posting from suppo.fi and not using your setup from Aussie.zone.

            If someone is at risk, they should follow the data hygiene suggested by the EFF. Especially if they’re concerned about their safety. Which was the implication in OP’s post.

            To your point about cloud front, not all web clients use encryptid hello yet, or encrypted DNS, so people monitoring connections to cloud front can see the domain you’re trying to connect to. This is exactly why CloudFront and AWS were upset with the signal foundation for doing domain front running when connecting to their services.

      • socsa@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I think there’s a real fear that federation can potentially leak a significant amount of user data, down to IPs and tracking fingerprints. Even if the version in the main git doesn’t do that, it’s not inconceivable that this kind of data mining could be quietly implemented as extensions/forks at some point. The threat surface just seems so massive with all the different servers involved in the trust model.

    • hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.works
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      I wanna add to this that censoring is a bit more relaxed. Every post lies on an instance, and control is given to hosts of an instance. So to censor, an actor has to gain control of the instance or the account that made the post.

      That said, if you are in the confines of political oppression, as the commenter above me said, never take your anonymity for granted and take active steps to stay safe.

  • hackris@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    On the internet, even if it’s a very nice open source platform, always operate under the assumption that nothing you say or do is anonymous. This is Internet usage 101, however, people seem to always ignore this. Do with this as you will :)

    • TauZero@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      American says: “We have democracy in our country. I can stand in front of the White House and shout “Down with Reagan!” and I will not be punished”. Soviet replies: “Oh, not a big deal, we also have democracy. I can stand in the Red Square and shout “Down with Reagan!” and I will not be punished either.”

    • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      I’ll test it:

      The government is a great.

      We’ll see if this gets removed.

      Hasn’t been removed yet, no censorship.

  • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Is Lemmy also censored by the government?

    Not directly. You would have to check with your instance owner if they’re reporting to your local government, as well as any instances you post to. Assume yes until confirmed otherwise.

    Or can I just openly discuss anything against the government here?

    This is a completely different question. Because Lemmy is a clearnet site, and frankly is more public by design than other social media sites, you probably shouldn’t discuss anything that could get you in trouble with your government if spoken anywhere else without using TOR or similar anonymizing software.

    • DieguiTux8623@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      Everything you post here is going to be public, so be mindful if you fear that anything you say could be held against you. No censorship (except the usual moderation done by community moderators) but imagine the police browsing through your Lemmy profile, reading all your posts/comments, after you have been charged with an allegation. In my case, police officers will surely have more than one heartfelt laughs…

  • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Depends on the government.

    The internet is endlessly being scraped for data, especially by governments. Lemmy can be scraped just as easily as any other website.

    Some governments are happy to let people more or less discuss whatever, because they know revolutionary steam is blown off by being allowed to talk about bad conditions. A loose grip has been shown to be more effective than a tight grip, when it comes to control.

    Other governments are more strict, and it doesn’t matter where you’ve been critical of them. If they can figure out who you are, and find out you said something on Lemmy that they think they can prosecute. Oh, they will, they will.