this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Password hashing occurs server-side. Even without removing the hashing step an admin can intercept the plaintext password during login. Use unique safe passwords.
An admin can intercept the jwt authentication cookie and use any account that lives in the instance.
Private messages are stored as plaintext in the database
Admins can see who upvotes/downvotes what
These are not things that are unique to Lemmy. This is common.
To avoid having to trust your admin, run an instance.
I'm assuming votes are all federated, so I think any instance admin would be able to see who voted in which direction for any post that gets federated to their instance, no? Or is it just the vote count that is federated?
The votes themselves are the federated action.
If you fetch an old post, your instance will not see the previous voters. After that, whenever a user votes the instance will get the message "User X@instance upvoted/downvoted post Y" and the vote will be added to the database with the voter's user ID and counted.
This has a practical function. If you don't keep a list specifying who voted for what, it would be much easier to fake votes from one instance to another by simply communicating the message "Downvote post Y". With the current method it is still possible to create a lot of fake accounts and mass-vote, but at least you can get a better insight when looking at the database if the votes are associated with accounts with no activity from a single instance.
There are some federated platforms that will show who likes / dislikes something. I know that friendica used to do this - I have not checked if it still does. So it is not only admins who can see this, this is is basically open information in the fediverse.