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.

  • books@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    How do I get access to the DB? do I need to spin up my own Fedi and federate?

    • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      That’s really the problem: any sort of troll, abusive group or lunatic can access the information by spinning up a federated server.

    • Muddybulldog@mylemmy.winOPEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Yes.

      Not all details get propagated across the Fediverse, e.g. your email address only stays with your home instance, but there is information that get’s propagated that may be non-obvious to a lot of people.

      • MolochAlter@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        It’s good to know that personal info is held only on the main instace you make an account on.

        Since you seem knowledgeable, is there a way to migrate your account from one instance to another?

        • Muddybulldog@mylemmy.winOPEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Not currently. Looking at the data it should be possible but I can’t make an assessment of how much coding effort would be involved. Export wouldn’t be a lot of work. Import would take a lot more consideration due to the need to reconcile data pointers and the effort involved in federating the changes, particularly when it comes to preserving timestamps.