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What does it mean when a social media is open source?
(literature.cafe)
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this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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Open Source has nothing to do whether data involved in the program/service is available, it refers to the source code. This source code is the recipe of the program, it is written in a programming language. When a project is open source people who make modifications to that code must publish the modifications with the same licence(generally speaking), thus ensuring a mutual knowledge exchange.
As for the data in Lemmy, yes you can see who upvoted posts and comments but it is not available in the interface. There is a website called Lemvotes or something that does this. To be clear, a project can be open source and not expose data of their users, for example the Matrix protocol.