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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The way I do it, if someone says they are actively searching, they roll and take what they roll. If they are not, then I use the passive score to let them know if they see something. However, I have played with DMs that use a rule where if you roll less than you passive then you can use your passive score.


  • Data signing is something I hadn’t thought of. I was envisioning something simpler, like individual authentication servers. It would then be up to each content server to appropriately tag each entry. Each organization (or individual if they want) would have an authentication server that verifies identity. Throw in some OAuth so each organization can control how the user is identified, and I think it could work.

    I can see the advantages of signing, though. Instance admins could pull a Spez, nor create posts in your name, and you can verify content ownership. There’s nothing that says a public key can’t be part of the authentication package. Drop in a LetsEncrypt integration and we have a solution.

    That just seems like another reason to adopt it, to me.


  • That’s true. If you have one identity for everything, then it’s trivial to collate your data. Maybe we can have a Do Not Track flag! That always works!

    But seriously, that does open up an interesting topic on privacy in the fediverse in general. As it stands, it wouldn’t be hard for an advertiser to open up a federated Lemmy instance and gather all kinds of data on every Lemmy instance, which could then be used for advertising on… what, Lemmy servers? I did read about some server reputation services people are working on to ban bot farms, so that might help there, but it’s not a whole solution. Could something like that be extended to the ecosystem as a whole? But then how much responsibility for a person’s privacy falls on the server operators versus themselves? Or in the end, would the benefits simply outweigh the risks, and we’d have to take the good with the bad, and people would just have to follow the usual rule of not putting anything on the Internet that you don’t want the world to know? A lot of gray area there.

    (Sorry for the train-of-thought posting style. I’m kinda imagining things as I go.)







  • For those of us who understand how the platform works, it wouldn’t be an issue. However, if we want mass adoption of the platform, we need to take into consideration those who don’t fully understand the technology and avoid situations that will lead to scams where feasible. Names of authority, like admin, root, super, etc., make a user appear to have authority they don’t, which can mislead new users. (“Support our server by sending bitcoin to this address that is really my personal wallet” type scams comes to mind.) You could say that it’s the person’s fault for falling for it, but it’s something that would drive people away from the platform which can be easily avoided in the first place.