Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…

What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

  • shagie@programming.devEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Just the other day, the computers of Kolektiva.social (mastodon instance) got seized by the FBI.

    Well, it wasn’t the other day - it was back in May. It was the other day that its users were notified that it happened.

    https://kolektiva.social/@admin/110637031574056150

    In mid-May 2023, the home of one of Kolektiva.social’s admins was raided, and all their electronics were seized by the FBI. The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest. Kolektiva was neither a subject nor target of this investigation. Today, that admin was charged in relation to their alleged participation in this protest.

    Unfortunately, at the time of the raid, our admin was troubleshooting an issue and working with a backup copy of the Kolektiva.social database. This backup, dated from the first week of May 2023, was in an unencrypted state when the raid occurred and it was seized, along with everything else.

    …

    I wouldn’t make any assumptions about the security of a particular instance of Lemmy or the locations of backups of the database that a developer or admin may have for testing.