There’s no way of knowing. But it would be dumb to assume they aren’t. Fun fact: your subscriptions and up/downvotes aren’t private on lemmy either, due to the nature of how federation works!

Tbe feds can watch deez nuts

Generally it is safe to assume that the NSA is ingesting the entire internet at close to realtime.

Is anyone actually looking here? Do they include this as a social media platform in their toolz? Do their tools know how to parse it as a social media platform?

Hard to say. All we can say is that if you are afraid of posting something on facebook because the NSA might see it, you should feel the same about lemmy.

You saw how they handled the Eptsein redactions, right? They’ve drained the federal government. I wouldn’t assume any level of competence at all.

I have zero doubt the fediverse is ingested by intelligence and law enforcement. But I would say it is more automated then actual eyes on posts.

Do I think that some desk nerd is planting himself in /c/trumpisafucktard trying to catfish the members into a meetup so they can kidnap him, waterboard him and then deport him to Lithuania? Of course not. Do I think that they have at some point had human eyeballs on something written on the fediverse that got flagged by AI? You can bet your trump-hating ass they have.

I imagine the feds(of all the letter varieties) have had the capability to scrape the entirety of the open internet and look for certain phrases or particular user data that meets their search criteria. If you think about it, Google has been doing it for years.

The 3-letter agencies are definitely on here, but it’s unlikely they will do anything. It’s more useful to keep watch

I will agree with people who suggested that Palantir is scraping anything and everything online that’s public looking for anything actionable. Every time I see some .ml user write an actionable threat on here, it puts all of us on the line. But they’re also probably scraping things like prepper forums and whatever. They’re using AI systems for this, not humans, so until you ping hot for something actionable, they’re just building a profile on you to tie accounts to you as a real person.

Why Palantir and not the NSA? Palantir don’t need no warrant. Even a FISA warrant takes a paper trail. That’s why contractors are contracted - to use third party doctrine to violate the 4th Amendment.

That being said, I strongly recommend:

• Don’t fucking doxx yourself. If you live in the US, don’t say what state or city unless it’s an account tied to you IRL.

• Don’t name, or even gender if you can avoid it, spouses, partners, or family members.

• Always connect with a VPN.

• Any account used through an app on a phone should be considered tied to you IRL.

• Don’t say anything on the internet you don’t want a prosecutor reading back to you in a monotone voice.

They’re heeeere.

I mean im regularly holding a sign with other like minded folk and chanting and such. Hardly need to hunt me down on the fediverse. Betting a large amount of our population could be rounded up in a similar manner.

Probably not that much yet, but they’ll be coming after us sooner or later as lemmy usership grows.

It took them almost 20 years before they seriously came after Reddit users (not that it hasn’t happened before, but not like this), but the government was always watching. And they’re certainly watching us here now.

And it’s every government, and plenty of corporations, too. Not just the United States government.

Given a tiny bit of knowledge on big data systems ……

• assume everything accessible is being copied, encrypted or not, kept forever
• there are continuous processes making links to people places times, and connecting the internet to real world data
• when someone wants to search for something, like uses the term “mango Mussolini “, it pretty quickly finds the set of all communications
• then you can further refine it “and lives in the dc area”, and end up with a list of people
• then you have ready links to clever where they’ve posted, everything they’ve said, every person they’ve connected with online or in real life
• and if you have encrypted data, can choose to brute force it (some will have to wait for technology)

It really no longer makes sense to wonder if they’re watching Lemmy. There’s no reason to pick specific places to watch when they can just collect everything, store it, then take their time searching for connections

What for?

There’s nothing on lemmy to monitor. You guys see the vanilla users of reddit and thought r/pics was too spicy.

Sitting around waiting to repost a no kings comment isn’t a concern for anyone.

Lemmy is created to post about beans and moths. That’s what federation is about. If anyone even thought about rocking the bot with a post that wasn’t related to beans or moths then you could stand up another instance and get back to our bean moth funny good time.

Lemmy is the digital left without an unseen well funded invisible hand guiding us. At least not yet. You’d think this is the opportunity to find strategy to build digital spaces to fight back against the rich sizing digital assets. Build communities and discussions to reject corporate influence and push back against the growth of fascism. But no. This is not what federation was ever about. It’s about recreating the SFW vanilla reddit front page but worse with less people. Hahaha haha bean moths so fucking cute. Imagine whose beans are these, I don’t know. Did you see the post where they photo shopped a moth on a guy eating beans. Fucking wild.

There’s nothing to monitor here.

there’s a few mental health communities on lemmy as well btw

Nobody is interested by the fediverse

Obviously government agencies harvest data but no more than off of anywhere else on the net