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Thanks for commenting on the issue, I appreciate the communication and it seems the community feels the same.

@lwadmin@lemmy.world @michelleg@lemmy.world @ruud@lemmy.world can you let us know if you or any admins of lemmy.world took a meeting with meta or representatives of meta?

@ruud@lemmy.world runs the 6th largest mastodon instance, and fosstodon instance admins (a smaller mastodon instance), were invited to an “off the record” meeting with Meta. The fosstodon admin, Kev, declined the meeting and notified their community about the correspondence going as far as to share screenshots.

In the correspondence, the meta rep said they were reaching out to mastodon admins, so if fosstodon got an invite, logic would figure they’d invite the admin(s) of a larger instance whom also happen to admin the largest lemmy instance in the world (lemmy.world)

I would love if the same level of transparency could occur here on lemmy.world

Were you folks invited, did you take it? I would really appreciate knowing if the people who run this instance have any relationships, formal or otherwise, with meta. A lot of lemmy users are here on the fediverse to escape the reach of companies like Meta when it comes to their social media.

Obviously no one is obligated to defederate from meta/threads when the time comes. But I would like to be informed.

I think it’s important to know. I personally would like to know, I would like to make informed decisions on which instance is my home on lemmy - but without all of the info, our decisions aren’t fully informed, so I have low confidence making any decision at this point.

Finally, I’ve posed similar questions before and have been accused by other users of wanting to attack lemmy admins if they did take a meeting, or for any reason at all. That could not be further from the truth. Online harassment is harassment, and is illegal in many jurisdictions. I don’t wish any harm or ill towards anyone, including those who have different values or opinions than mine. Finally, I’ve always been cordial in my submissions on lemmy, I don’t know what would make anyone think I’d start behaving differently now.

I think these questions are important, and I intend to continue asking them until we have an answer, so that I can make a decision with confidence that I had sufficient information to do so.

I hope that seems as reasonable as I feel it is, though I could be wrong, please feel free to respond with your thoughts. I appreciate the discourse.

Thanks yall.

Quite the assumption. I’m sorry for making you sick, though.

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Fair enough, I can’t argue with being careful.

I’m still curious if they took a meeting. And for admins who have an open support thread and are responsive to support questions, I’d expect they can handle showing up to a post and answer some questions their community has.

That said, I’m just one person and there’s no obligation to answer to little old me. Thankfully this post can be upvoted or downvoted, so the community can choose to support this inquiry or bury it. And I suppose, lemmy.world admins can choose to respond or simply ignore it.

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Agreed, I could absolutely understand ruuds trepidation, if there is any.

The thing is, just say that. Say, “hey I’m afraid you guys are gonna eat me alive if I make the wrong call, and for that reason, I’m taking care to abstain from any call.” We would absolutely understand.

But at this point I also want to know, did you or anyone representing lemmy.world take that meeting?

Wonder if they were invited to metas p92 meeting for “off the record conversation” and obliged

I’d love to take credit but that was midjourney (and all the artists that feed its capabilities.)

I think my prompt was “a logo featuring a mouse holding a magnifying glass”

I’ve since realized that I should have said lemming instead of mouse, but a dummy like me can only do so much.

Great point and ideas, I hope to see things like this introduced as the lemmy project matures

Those are good practices if you have privacy concerns.

we’re just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data

Semi-public. As it stands, only instance admins have access to per-user vote data. Possibly also API users, but I’m not sure the lemmy api has an endpoint for exposing per-user vote data, I believe it just gives you a tally of the up/down votes of posts and comments, but not who made each vote. But most people don’t have the skillset to host their own instance and process the data into something meaningful/easy to digest.

You could make the argument that semi-public is basically public, but I think there is some nuance to be explored:

Once a site like open lemmy stats launches, it becomes trivial for any user to query that data, who upvoted what, who downvoted what, when they up/downvoted it, etc.

There’s a difference between something being available to people motivated enough to get it vs it reaching critical mass and being trivial to access by anyone with a browser. How the data is ultimately used, whether it is used nefariously or not, is going to be up to the people that access openlemmystats and what they wish to use it for.

Which has me considering an analogy, without expressly intending to make this political, please consider the statement “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. “Openlemmystats doesnt harass political dissenters! The people who use it do!”. One could argue that openlemmystats wouldn’t do anything inherently bad, it’s the people who would use it. Just like with guns, there will likely be debate on whether or not the world would be better without openlemmystats or if we should start doing things to make it impossible for openlemmystats-alike sites to exist.

That said, I mostly agree with you, and I appreciate your privacy suggestions/best practices, good stuff!

Edit: for the record, I think “guns don’t kill people, people do” is a stupid statement, but I thought it was an interesting analogy. That is to say nothing of my feelings on gun control, I’m just not a fan of distilling complex issues into dismissive one line statements.

biggest concern is getting all participating instances to agree

I see what you mean, that is true if the responsibility ultimately ends up falling on instance owners.

Which is why I’m hoping that the developments instead occur on the Lemmy project itself and other fediverse project code bases. Lemmy devs and contributors will hopefully work on privacy and security as the Lemmy project matures. If instance admins are keeping their instances mostly up to date, there is virtually no (dis)agreement to be had: the mitigation patches will be loaded on the next update.

Of course, anyone can fork lemmy or manually remove these changes from their instance, or some admins may simply refuse to update, but that would reflect badly and privacy minded users may choose move to another instance that has updated to the latest/most secure version of Lemmy and other instance owners can also choose to defederate from instances that leave themselves vulnerable to issues that have been patched out.

There are handsome penalties for violating copyright but torrent trackers are still thriving, I expect similar legal evasion tactics from sites like OpenLemmyStats