Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
My concern is that the devs have shown a willingness to keep their finger on the scale and use .ml as a tool for this ideological end in any way possible. If, eg, there is a way for a malicious instance to modify federated content from other instances and republish it, I would confidently say that the .ml devs certainly have the ability, and have shown a willingness to engage in that kind of agitprop. At the very least I think we have to take this threat seriously.
Furthermore, If .ml were to be treated as a state espionage actor, federating with them is exposing your users to very significant risks, as it would be trivial for them to collect identifying information via federation, and to promote malicious or compromised websites by modifying their feeds, or even the feeds of individual users. They could very easily collect identifying information from a target, and then modify a web application to serve malware to that specific user, which they push to the top of that users feed in various ways.
This is an aspect of the fediverse which generally makes me uncomfortable. Even if the core code is safe and audited, there is nothing stopping a malicious admin from running modified versions of the front end or forum code. Again, it would even be possible to only serve such malicious content to individual targets, and federating content with them provides an incredibly convenient threat surface for performing this kind of targeted analysis.
The biggest thing stopping this kind of behavior would be “who the fuck would bother?” And the scale needed to provide cover for the operation. Who? Well, an admin who openly admits they are waging information warfare in the fediverse, that’s who. Or perhaps a dev who appropriates the name of an infamous murdering zealot as a symbol for his “cause.” How? Maybe via one of the largest and most visible instances on the fediverse?
Of course, I have no evidence that this actually happens. It would be incredibly difficult to detect such targeted threats. But the whole combination of the way the admin and devs handle themselves, and the adversarial way they interact with the rest of the fediverse, just triggers all sorts of red flags in the secOps part of my lizard brain, and it bothers me that people don’t seem to be taking these threats seriously.
I hear you. My perspective may be slightly different from yours because I have more faith in the devs. I believe them when they make statements about supporting privacy and open source. I understand that they have some extreme beliefs regarding political ideology, but I think it’s unfair to use that as evidence that their ethics are compromised in other aspects. They certainly have an agenda, but they also ultimately have principles and I would be quite surprised if they committed such a betrayal.
It’s like the old adage about conservatives being pro-life right up until the baby is born. People compartmentalize their feelings on different issues and parts of their life, and I think that within the compartment of software development, the devs seem quite ethical. Within the compartment of sociopolitical theory, they have opinions that many would characterize as unethical. But I don’t think the latter implies that the former is likely to be compromised.
I’m not really well versed in software, so I can’t offer much in terms of discussing potential vulnerabilities on that level. I’m glad that someone is worrying about it though.
And that brings me to my second point, which is that the Lemmy userbase is chock full of techies, skeptics, and critical thinkers. Even if they did have some grand scheme to propagandize us, I just don’t think it would work. It’d be similar to what’s happening now, with people independently calling them out and then collectively dealing with the issue.
The time when the Lemmy devs could hope to control the evolution of this platform is long past. They’re outnumbered and there is a substantial negative sentiment about them amongst the userbase. I’m really not too worried about the harm they might cause. I’m more concerned about making a rash decision that creates more problems than it solves.
I am not worried about propaganda. I am worried about a state actor performing pattern analysis on my user, trying it to a specific IP address, and then serving me targeted malware. The fediverse is unique in that sense because of the nature of federation exposes a significant amount of user telemetry to a huge number of different internet hosts.
At this point I am 100% convinced that if hexbears could perform cyber attacks at the behest of China, they would do it enthusiastically. And .ml Admins protect hexbears. To me, that’s motive and opportunity, and it would be naive and foolish to trust them given the adversarial nature of the way they interact with the broader fediverse.
What problems does defederation even cause? Do we have sympathy for this tumor? The very fact that they are openly willing to engage in information warfare, and are being marginalized for it only makes the threat bigger in my mind. If they feel like they are losing this war, their behavior will only grow more extreme. I would again like to reiterate that “Dessalines” is literally the historical poster child for “extreme ends justify any means.”
What problems does defederation even cause?
We certainly lose a ton of active communities and users. Potentially, we continue to exacerbate an ideological divide that ultimately results in the complete disintegration of Lemmy, forcing us to start over on another platform and lose many of our gains from the past year.
Do we have sympathy for this tumor?
Yes. It’s not a tumor, it’s an internet community with a large number of communists who want to take down Western capitalism. It’s a couple of developers who had a vision of a link aggregation platform for the people, by the people. I have plenty of sympathy for them, even though I understand they could potentially be dangerous due to their political extremism.
It seems like you’re aggressively trying to eliminate a hypothetical problem, while discounting the very real consequences of defederation. Even if we go through with it and it goes relatively well, it would cause a significant dip in growth and activity, which we desperately need.
You raise some interesting points, and I don’t think they should be dismissed out of hand. I have some questions though (some of them are re: your other comments here):
[…] some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content.
Could you speak to this in a little more detail? Does what you are seeing inherently require functionality beyond what Lemmy’s public release offers natively, or is beyond the scope of something like an automod tool? Asked honestly, I am not an IT professional.
[…] if .ml were to be treated as a state espionage actor […] it would be trivial for them to collect identifying information via federation and to promote malicious or compromised websites by modifying their feeds, or even the feeds of individual users.
This is obviously a very serious accusation, but let’s put that aside for a moment.
My (limited) understanding is that as a function of using the ActivityPub protocol, it is already trivial to collect identifying information on users of federated services. What makes lemmy.ml unique in this regard - couldn’t a bad actor do this just as easily by other means? Simply it’s comparative size to other instances/services that can be leveraged for this purpose? Aren’t there lower profile means of accomplishing this same thing?
I don’t know enough about how federation works from a technical perspective to speak to feed manipulation when viewing a ‘rogue actor’ instance from a place like sh.itjust.works, but welcome comments/clarifying questions on this point from smarter people than myself. Want to know more, just don’t know what to ask.
Federation exposes potentially quite a bit of user telemetry data through a few different vectors. For example, simply loading a thumbnail from another instance exposes a user’s IP to that host instance. The exact ability for a third instance to tie a specific web request or usage pattern to a specific user is unclear, but is not a large leap. I am working through some specific exploit ideas on a test server I run, but I don’t have a ton of time these days, and it’s difficult to model some of these vectors without real traffic. I can say that so far, if a user interacts with a post soon after making the content request, it’s pretty easy to grab their IP, especially on low traffic content. So if I can see that a user interacts with a niche community (because votes are federated for some strange reason), I can target them that way. I should also be able to set a cookie via the content request, as well as do all the typical browser fingerprinting tricks. Once that association happens, it becomes trivial to serve malicious content to an individual user. This is a very serious threat vector specifically because it’s easy to hide what you are doing from the rest of the world, so it requires vigilance by the target to uncover. If it is done rarely it would be all but impossible to spot.
The broader point is that there is clear motive and plausible opportunity here. From a cyber security perspective, that’s enough to take preventative and protective measures.
