Well, I mean, there is a lack of privacy. That’s kind of how the platform exists architecturally. I just don’t find that to be a problem, per se. It’s a social platform, which makes sense to me for everything on the protocol to be “open” to one degree or another. Not everything has to be securitymaxxed.
The fact that everything you write, upload or otherwise do (boost, upvote, downvote, etc.) is never private in any way or at any point, on any platform using the ActivityPub protocol, including Mastodon, along with every other platform or service that’s a part of the Fediverse, such as Lemmy or Piefed. Everything is out in the open, able to be seen by third parties.
This is by design, and it’s what enables federation to take place between a multitude of servers aka. instances. So it’s a trade off.
But properly implemented encryption could help to mitigate this to some degree. I think think most things won’t meaningfully benefit from being encrypted, since most things on these platforms are meant to be publicly visible in the first place - such as this conversation you and I are having now. But it would certainly be nice to be able to have direct messages that are also for sure private messages. And I can imagine a couple of other things where encryption could also be meaningfully applied, to some extent.
Private messages are completely private, you as normal user can never see someone elses private message. The only ones who can theoretically read private messages from other users are instance admins. Exactly the same on Reddit or Twitter by the way. But if any admin actually does that, people would quickly spread the word and leave that instance.
End-to-end encryption does add some extra security in that admins also cannot read other users private messages. I dont think that people really send very sensitive information through Lemmy private messages, it is better to use an actual messenger application for that.
Well, I mean, there is a lack of privacy. That’s kind of how the platform exists architecturally. I just don’t find that to be a problem, per se. It’s a social platform, which makes sense to me for everything on the protocol to be “open” to one degree or another. Not everything has to be securitymaxxed.
I agree with you. It’s a social platform. Most people might think it’s a nice feature, but I don’t think E2EE is an urge.
What lack of privacy are you referring to?
The fact that everything you write, upload or otherwise do (boost, upvote, downvote, etc.) is never private in any way or at any point, on any platform using the ActivityPub protocol, including Mastodon, along with every other platform or service that’s a part of the Fediverse, such as Lemmy or Piefed. Everything is out in the open, able to be seen by third parties.
This is by design, and it’s what enables federation to take place between a multitude of servers aka. instances. So it’s a trade off.
But properly implemented encryption could help to mitigate this to some degree. I think think most things won’t meaningfully benefit from being encrypted, since most things on these platforms are meant to be publicly visible in the first place - such as this conversation you and I are having now. But it would certainly be nice to be able to have direct messages that are also for sure private messages. And I can imagine a couple of other things where encryption could also be meaningfully applied, to some extent.
Private messages are completely private, you as normal user can never see someone elses private message. The only ones who can theoretically read private messages from other users are instance admins. Exactly the same on Reddit or Twitter by the way. But if any admin actually does that, people would quickly spread the word and leave that instance.
End-to-end encryption does add some extra security in that admins also cannot read other users private messages. I dont think that people really send very sensitive information through Lemmy private messages, it is better to use an actual messenger application for that.
I don’t think you can claim there’s a “lack of privacy” when things that are intended to be public…are made public.