lohrun

One of the problems with the fediverse is that each server keeps its own copy of the content. It is definitely a worry that bad actors push content to federated servers to get them taken down due to the content they now are storing.

Oh I wish we had the ability to fully delete our content that we’ve posted or that someone has posted of us. Illegal content is a huge concern with federation. As soon as someone pushes something like that, it gets sent to all the federated instances so they have a copy as well. That is a huge concern for instance owners (and honestly the fediverse as a whole).

I run a kbin instance and I’m a software developer for my day job. I honestly don’t have a great answer for “how do we ensure the data we request be deleted on the fediverse is actually deleted.” My best solution would for us to have several federated master databases that we maintain our federated content with. If there is a big delete flag for some content then the child instances will follow suit.

It’s no different than me sending an email to someone and then sending a request to delete it. There likely is still a copy on the email provider’s server and the recipient could have potentially backed up their emails to something outside of the email ecosystem.

Unfortunately the only way to be absolutely sure that there isn’t information you don’t want on the internet is to not share it at all. There will always be an issue of making sure every system actually deletes content when you request it. Like I said, that doesn’t stop anyone from backing up the data to another system. (E.g. Reddit archives from 2005 to now are available to download, even content that has already been deleted)

Yup! You can also subscribe to users and specific domains posted on an instance as well:

https://fediverse.boo/rss?magazine=news
https://fediverse.boo/rss?domain=bbc.com
https://fediverse.boo/rss?user=lohrun

So the first link would give you an RSS feed of my news magazine, the second link would give you an rss feed of any post from my instance that had bbc.com linked as the main post article, and the third link is an rss feed of all the stuff I post as a user.

Obviously it doesn’t have to be my instance you use either, you can also do https://kbin.social/rss?magazine=news for other instances as well! I’m not sure if lemmy has rss support though. It’s kind of a cool “hidden feature” that you can use to curate a RSS feed off of already curated content.

Also as a follow up @amitten, turns out you can take a kbin magazine and turn it into a RSS feed. So technically you can subscribe to my news magazine from my instance with this: https://fediverse.boo/rss?magazine=news

I’ve been posting articles that I find interesting that I think other people might enjoy over on my instance at @news I try to stay away from political posting because subreddits quickly became echo chambers with politics and I don’t want to deal with that lol.

I say come on over and check out the stuff I’m posting, if you find it interesting… I believe most of the sources I am posting have RSS feeds you can subscribe to.

Smaller pop instance admins such as myself could do a better job at advertising we are open for new people to register. It definitely feels weird for me to go out and advertise my instance though (since you know I would have to post on other instance’s communities for it to be seen)

It’d be cool if we had a dedicated place we could drop a post mentioning our servers so people could see. Advertising new instances won’t be a problem for now, but I could see it being an issue once bad actors get bots set up here.

I have thought about writing something like that. We probably would want to do it 1 subreddit at a time to back up to a specific community.

Is that something we think we would need or want? I haven’t done it yet because I don’t want Lemmy to just be a Reddit content aggregator, I want us to have our own content and communities.

I think we need something like that for twitter and for Reddit. Having something quick and concise with some links where to go is bound to get more bound headed our way

Will it really matter if all the power users and mods end up leaving? All that will be left is low effort stuff