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Its gotten really bad now that hidden profiles are a thing.
Hidden profiles?
Basically all comment history is hidden. Very popular with totally organic pro Maga accounts.
I've seen several accounts here on Lemmy that go to an error page when you click on the name on their post. I always report them to the admins and never see them again. Never heard back from anyone what's going on. I've developed a habit of checking the profiles of posts that just seem off.
Oh, actually I was forced to do that myself due to the slight possibility of doxxing, etc. Ten-year account over there that I still use, and traditionally I practice complete transparency. But the times, they is be changing...
Oh, actually there is a workaround (or at least there used to be). Add the acct in question as a "friend," then click on the Friend stream. You'll be able to see their content.
Just delete your account and start a new one. There is literally nothing that you gain from using an old account apart from increased risk.
As someone who has gotten banned by the admins for stupid reasons that should have been overturned but weren't.......... Having a new account is a pain in the ass for a couple of months and/or until you build up karma.
It's stupidly painful.
One can get banned for that, as well as the fact that you're once again uploading info that might possibly be used against you in future. Even the Fediverse tracks its accounts as I understand it and makes one's history semi-permanent.
The only true alternative I know is to take part in an accountless system or one which is heavily anonymized, like the 'Chan' stuff or whatever. For me it's just far easier to tread lightly, and avoid certain topics.
EDIT: Downvote away, but give me a rebuttal if you can.
Fedi, tracking accounts? What do you mean by "tracking"?
Semi-permanent, yeah, I'll give you that one. That said, if you delete something, generally it's actually deleted. Any servers which turn out to be ignoring delete requests tend to get cut off from everyone else pretty quickly. I guess there's always the possibility your "hey this post was deleted" notification might not bubble through to a given server, but it should work.
Yes, I think you explained it well. I'd not stated it very precisely, and I do feel like this is a low-risk platform at the moment.
Still, there's always the potential risk that whatever is posted & commented here can be tracked and recorded in to a permanent record of sorts. And that AI / other tools could possibly be used to collect such info and profile people. Things are changing fast, so I deem it best to be cautious, with an eye on the future.
The only true alternative is to just have more alts, one for specific interests where each each individual one is not enough to ban you. Platforms that clearly have thrived off of them should facilitate people using them instead of using it as an excuse to ban people when they want to.
It also doesn't help when those platforms are deliberately trying to harvest as much personal data they can off of their users and often have engagement bait posts to get their users to get them to identify increasingly personal data about themselves that is otherwise nothing anyone would care about.
I'm not sure how they do it exactly, but Reddit is evidently really good at detecting alts. Not necessarily by IP# or common information across accounts, but by... well I don't know, some deep algorithms or something?
Reddit still has use to me, and there are one or two communities in which I have roots and a relationship with the mods, etc. I'd really rather not mess around with that or risk getting in to an 'account war' with Reddit over alts. At least at this time...
They also use browser fingerprinting, session information, and geolocation, powered by generative AI. IP can easily be cycled in most ISPs, so they'd end up hurting themselves if they just used that.
Shoot... some of that stuff I should be able to block via my U-matrix extension. Would just need to play around with the javascripts, I guess.
I've seen some links posted to sites that somehow manage to show comment history even for accounts with it hidden as well. Apparently the feature is pretty half baked.
hidden or deleted?
No. I'm talking about exactly what I said.