I’ve done a lot of low rate or entirely volunteer work for small, often non-profit organizations in the past, and don’t fall into the trap. It can be thankless and it can be soul sucking.

However, obviously if you want to eat and if this is your only income right now you’ll have to stick it out a bit. So I hope we are talking like you are virtually working no hours for that rate, leaving you time to expand your resume on your own.

I have often been asked in the past by friends or acquaintances how you get a good career in programming, and the answer typically is either luck, or a lot of your own hard work.

I don’t know what the job market is like these days, but historically your papers mean very little to getting a job. A link to your Github goes a long way to demonstrate your abilities and provides a much higher degree of confidence you know what you are doing because they can actually look at your work, and if you are contributing to other projects, that you are a team player. As one speaker said at a Google Q&A I watched when asked if a PhD would increase their chance of getting hired: “well, we won’t hold having a PhD against you”.

There is also a lot of free course material out there to various degrees of difficulty.

Programming is becoming more and more competitive, and the ones that succeed have made it their passion, which does mean a lot of unpaid work. So either find projects you are happy to provide your time to to sharpen your skill, or start your own project that you can get satisfaction in building. Actually programming something is always the fastest way to improve your skill.

So, obviously an anti Lemmy bias there, and not entirely true, but there are some aspects of federation it can be dangerous to ignore.

There is a different primary privacy focus here, and it provides an extreme level of privacy but places an extreme level of responsibility on the user for their own privacy, more than most places.

There is a distinction to a potential scrape and a system designed to duplicate, often irreversibly at submit.

There are also other things people are often not aware of and the community is not doing a great job communicating. Admins are not doing a great job of protecting themselves either.

For instance many, still don’t know votes here are entirely public.

If you understand this all and are comfortable, great. Many do not prepare themselves and would engage differently if they had a better understanding.

For a take by someone who is pro-federation but not ignoring these concerns see: https://lemmy.ca/post/948217

I’d also argue stalking has more to do with the mental health issues of the stalker than the victim being to blame for how they interacted with the world. We don’t tell a student not to participate in lectures because someone may latch onto something they said and become infatuated. We punish stalkers instead.

If someone is aware and engaging to their comfort level, no matter how open, I would not blame them, the victim, for being stalked. If someone wanted to be cautious, but they didn’t know the risks here, I would feel guilty for not educating them on how they can protect themselves.

Idk this is a ramble. I see so many things so often that used to be personal responsibility on online safety, that instead of teaching the skills we make tools. And i feel like not teaching good personal safety and protection is goong to doom any project ultimately.

You can’t fix ignorance without education.

Which is the entire point of my post, to encourage education in this space (which again, again, again, is different than what many are coming from with its own unique set of risks)

I appreciate that you are reflecting on how you want to manage your own privacy in this space!

People should be educated enough of the pros and cons as much as possible, although that might mean some would get intimidated and refuse to join.

Bingo. Which would you rather do, talk someone’s pants off, or scare them off or otherwise have them caught with them down?

Also love your local domain.

I’ve had a similar idea. Want to have a race to market? (you’ll have a head start, I’m heading into the domain of managing federation block lists next).

Yeah. I can see a case made on either side.

This is the point I am trying to drive home. Even with zero comments, zero posts, you could doxx yourself accidentally with votes alone. You came here from another platform and had a certain expectation of how privacy works here. It does intuitively feel like it should be private.

You are trading some privacy for censorship resistance and community safety in this case, because the goals are different here.

If you trust your admin to keep your IP and email private, and you manage your comments and posts carefully, I encourage you to let your voice be heard and upvote every sinnerdotbin’s pantless picture post of the week (just don’t like the posts in a different, very small and niche category that can link to you publically as you are the chair of the board at never-nude.social, and there are only 5 members who always like the same posts) . If you are in a country where that support might end with you in a work camp, I’d maybe advise against it in case your local turns out to be a honeypot.

There is a privacy component to federation that the world really would benefit from, but it will be lost if people are not informed. Incredibly private if you are aware how to navigate it. Horrible if you aren’t.

Unless a user is viewing from kbin, which interoperates here. It is entirely in view to the kbin UI (and Mastodon I believe).

Votes are entirely public, Lemmy just made a UI choice not to show them. They show up if someone views it from kbin and ultimately something that could be mined from a self hosted admin.

I think this information may make some of those who profess “everything is saved on the internet and why care” change their tune.

Saves I am not sure about yet. Think that may be locals only.

Edit: community subscriptions are another. I believe the admin that hosts the community has access to the sub, but this may also be available to anyone self hosting. Haven’t confirmed anything regarding subs yet, maybe that is locals only too.

Also USA does have laws regarding site usage by children. This was brought over from the Mastodon policy I adapted.

You’re almost there.

Only if your home server remains unfederated. Even then other users of the server will be able to see everything. And will be more likely to remember, like miss Busy Body.

Uh, a, if not the primary point in my post?

Your IP, your email, will remain private at your local if your admin is responsible. If you act to your comfort level in your engagement, you will remain private in the public sphere.

If you self host, or find an admin you have incredible trust in, you should remain untraceable if you manage your engagement responsibly.

Though another thing I highlight in the policies is this is experimental software. Leaks can and will happen. We have a voice and can play an active part in preserving that privacy.

Recorder is always on by default with your engagement; recorder is always off by default when it comes to things that automatically identify you. It is the opposite in a monolith service.

Booo to miss Busy Body.

It does to many, thus the awareness of how it works here, that is all.

If you don’t think it matters, or you understand enough to be sure never to expose yourself in a way that you are uncomfortable with that is awesome! Many are waking up to a realization of the nature of things here they were previously not aware of, and some are growing very uncomfortable with that now that they can’t adapt their previous engagement to that knowledge.

I don’t think the word “privacy” is a good word for the concept. I believe “user data control” or “right to be forgotten” is more appropriate for the “deletion issue”. However, there are few privacy issues such as instance admins having access to private messages and the potential for a hack to expose users e-mail addresses and usernames.

This has been debated, and is very dependent on the context. It is a very broad concept to try to address and the lines do get blurred on the definition of what is “private data”. The hope here is to partition the responsibilities of the admin from the user.

I explain the distinction in the post. It is very different on a platform designed to distribute at instant of hitting submit.

Also…

I do expect my account to be secure, in that no one should be able to pretend to be me.

Surprise! They very easily can here.

When you shout in a town square, does everything else you’ve ever shouted, everything you’ve ever voiced your support for, everything you follow closely echo and remain in that square?

Again, this is a feature. But one people really have to understand before they engage here.

Thanks! I’m for mass adoption and want admins to succeed. That starts with keeping users educated (and admins covered).

This is largely assumed by someone like yourself or I who understands the implications. I am finding it evident that a lot of people are not aware.

There is also a distinction to a potential screenshot, a scrape or archive no one visits, and a federated copy on a widly used instance you have lost access to.

I edited my comment above to include a project I am working on to hopefully help admins get this across and educate users on how to appropriately engage to their comfort level.

This keeps on being asserted but it is far from true. If defederation happens or your local goes offline, posts/comment history/profile/votes will remain on other widely used instances and out of your control.

A large instance has already defederated with 2 other larger instances. If you run a personal instance I feel it will become very, very common to be be locked out of managing your data.

You can expect defederation to happen all the time as that is a deliberate part of the open federated model.

And that is to say nothing about federation simply breaking sometimes.

I already have been locked out of content that exists on other instances that will remain forever and I’ve only been around a short while. I don’t care personally, but people keep asserting this claim that only bad actors or scrapers will dupe your data. Federated data is very different than a non-federated copy for many reasons and that matters to some people. Everyone should understand deleting your account, or modifying your content will often not remove your content outside your instance, and many people engage outside their local. It will likely exist in federated, Lemmy searchable form forever in some capacity (in the current iteration anyway).

Not trying to spread FUD, but if we want to maintain users they have to be educated as they will find out eventually and not be happy.

I have some working drafts on policies for admins to help them navigate and explain their responsibilities to their users.

It is a bit of a weird read outside of the context, but this is an optional primer I have drafted that will hopefully help explain the distinctions:

https://github.com/BanzooIO/federated_policies_and_tos/blob/main/optional-privacy-policy-intro.md