Changes to Lemmy/PieFed to adjust to living under fascism

[rimu@piefed.social]

too destructive for compatibility with other ActivityPub software

Yes, but that's Ok, not every community needs to federate outside PieFed. There can be a mix of insecure (widely-compatible) and secure (PieFed only) communities. PieFed does not be need to be held back by the limitations of ActivityPub as we know it today.

[rimu@piefed.social]

Yes this is a good minimum. We need our instance-chooser guides/websites to surface this information so people can make choices about which instances they join.

Currently if you go to https://joinmastodon.org/servers or https://join-lemmy.org/instances there is no way to filter for VPN compatibility, allowing disposable email, logging policy or legal jurisdiction (in the case of join-lemmy). Or political alignment, defederation policy...

[rimu@piefed.social]

I hope you feel better soon.

[microw@lemm.ee]

Instances.social surfaces some of the server rules into a nice UI for mastodon instances but yeah, those things you mention would also be nice.

[iopq@lemmy.world]

Then use a key you never used before to encrypt it

[falseprophet@fedia.io]

Well he is already doing that with piefed

[burgersc12@mander.xyz]

Piefed also doesn't really fit his description. He wants something more akin to Signal, since that was designed around E2E encryption. Anything that uses ActivityPub is never gonna be able to fit into his idea for security, since it was designed to do the exact opposite and distribute content to basically anyone who asks for it.

[falseprophet@fedia.io]

Maybe, I am not very familiar how activitypub works. Maybe he can work around it.

[burgersc12@mander.xyz]

ActivityPub is how federation is accomplished. You cannot "work around" how the system is fundamentally designed. ActivityPub might get E2E encryption on DMs at some point but the rest is simply not possible if you want to be able to interact with the rest of the Fediverse.

[cabbage@piefed.social]

Just to clarify, you are aware that OP is the developer of PieFed?

Chances are that PieFed more or less fits his idea of what he wants, considering that's what he designed it to do.

[burgersc12@mander.xyz]

Nope, wasn't aware. Still seems like ActivityPub is the wrong way to go if your priorities include encryption and anonymity.

[rimu@piefed.social]

Theoretically in the future PieFed might not be limited to only using ActivityPub, or only using Lemmy-compatible ActivityPub.

[burgersc12@mander.xyz]

Hmm that's fair. I wasn't aware of the differences between Piefed and Lemmy when I first made my comments, but I do wish you luck with implementing all this! Piefed seems cool, guess I'll have to check it out a bit more in depth lol

[cabbage@piefed.social]

ActivityPub is absolutely not suited for private communication. I guess you could in theory transfer encrypted content over AP as well, but it's not what it is designed for and it generally makes little sense for content in a public forum like this. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise.

This is not what is proposed though. For E2EE, Rimu suggests the following:

Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data

So to keep user data encrypted on the server, as well as looking into finding a way to encrypt private messages. I think it's hard to argue this wouldn't be at least a minor change for the better, giving instance administrators less insight into the private data of the users (and thereby also making them less vulnerable to law enforcement).

Of course this wouldn't make PieFed or Lemmy or whatever a good replacement for Signal. It is not supposed to be. It's a public forum. But it can still do its best to protect the identity of the users in this public forum, even with the inherent limitations of the format.