Sleepless One
Insomniac code gorilla. I help maintain lemmy-ui and, to a lesser extent, Lemmy’s backend.
Your account is on lemmy.ml, which had some downtime the other day to test a beta version of the 0.19.4 release. Unfortunately, there were major performance issues and the admins had to revert to the old version and go back to a backup of the database from before the upgrade.
While I can’t guarantee that’s the cause of your issue, it would explain why users from other instances aren’t having the same problem.
Speaking as a FOSS maintainer, typos should be trivial to fix as long as it’s in a language the devs are fluent in. The kind of up front work you mentioned putting in to your tickets is practically the platonic ideal of a good issue.
Speaking also as a corpo codemonkey (like the people at Bethesda), management and product consistently — through short-sighted hair-brained schemes and giving zero shits about what actually goes into making a software product — raise a shit ton of barriers to getting even simple things done. This leaves little choice but to make quick but shoddy ways of implementing features to meet the deadline, which in turn creates tech-debt which is itself a barrier.
I could understand the “just make a pull request, bro” response if someone comes in demanding a vaguely defined feature that seemingly no one else has expressed interest in. We’ve used that answer several times for issues raised for Lemmy. In your case though, the response seems unwarranted.
The only PII the software itself stores are usernames, bcrypt hashes of passwords, JWT session tokens and, if the admin requires it or the user gives it voluntarily, emails. With this in mind, there are still important caveats to keep in mind.
First, there is no way to verify if a given instance is running a fork that collects more information than the upstream repo, not to mention any logging they might be doing. This is where Lemmy being self-hostable is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if you have the sysadmin knowhow or know someone trustworthy who does, you can setup your own instance that you can be certain doesn’t collect any data you don’t expect it to. On the other hand, there is no way to prevent malicious actors from making compromised instances.
The other important caveat is that all posts and comments are public. Personal information you post in posts and comments can be used to identify you. This is true of all social media, even ones that don’t use usernames such as 4chan and similar chan-like image boards. No amount of software related privacy features can save you from bad opsec.
