The fediverse has a bullying problem
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Can you share the proposal? ActivityPods is something else. https://activitypods.org/
This is wedistribute’s blogpost on the proposal
I thought it had some sort of branding beyond nomadic identity but I guess I was just misremembering
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This is in part because he's in public trainwreck mode fairly often.
That's why I say it is bullying.
He does post trainwreck statuses sometimes, or miss self-imposed deadlines, or something. That's very very different from "incompetent for implementing badly something easy or toxic for federating ignoring what the federation requires" but it gives people a grain of truth to fall back on when the total bullshit they're accusing him of gets called out.
Some for JordanLund, same for FlyingSquid. People are imperfect. It's okay. If your habit is to use people's imperfections as a reason to make wild accusations at them that have no basis in reality and double down on the legitimate criticisms and pick at them, and generally just be shitty to them, then there is a perfect word for that activity.
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So check it out: Mastodon decided to implement follower-only posts for their users. All good. They did it in a way where they were still broadcasting those posts (described as "private") in a format that other servers could easily wind up erroneously showing them to random people. That's not ideal.
Probably the clearest explanation of the root of the problem is this:
Something you may not know about Mastodon's privacy settings is that they are recommendations, not demands. This means that it is up to each individual server whether or not it chooses to enforce them. For example, you may mark your post with unlisted, which indicates that servers shouldn't display the post on their global timelines, but servers which don't implement the unlisted privacy setting still can (and do).
Servers don't necessarily disregard Mastodon's privacy settings for malicious reasons. Mastodon's privacy settings aren't a part of the original OStatus protocol, and servers which don't run a recent version of the Mastodon software simply aren't configured to recognize them. This means that unlisted, private, or even direct posts may end up in places you didn't expect on one of these servers—like in the public timeline, or a user's reblogs.
That is super relevant for "private" posts by Mastodon. They fall into the same category as how you've been voting on Lemmy posts and comments: This stuff seems private, because it's being hidden in your UI, but it's actually being broadcasted out to random untrusted servers behind the scenes, and some server software is going to expose it. It's simply going to happen. You need to be aware of that. Even if it's not shown in your UI, it is available.
Anyway, Pixelfed had a bug in its handling of those types of posts, which meant that in some circumstances it would show them to everyone. Somebody wrote on his blog about how his partner has been posting sensitive information as "private," and Pixelfed was exposing it, and how it's a massive problem. For some reason, Dansup (Pixelfed author) taking it seriously and fixing the problem and pushing out a new version within a few days only made this person more upset, because in his (IMO incorrect) opinion, the way Dansup had done it was wrong.
I think the blog-writer is just mistaken about some of the technical issues involved. It sounds like he's planning on telling his partner that it's still okay to be posting her private stuff on Mastodon, marked "private," now that Pixelfed and only Pixelfed has fixed the issue. I think that's a huge mistake for reasons that should be obvious. It sounds like he's very upset that Dansup made it explicit that he was fixing this issue, thinking that even exposing it in commit comments (which as we know get way more readership than blog posts) would mean people knew about it, and the less people that knew about it, the safer his partner's information would be since she is continuing to do this apparently. You will not be surprised to discover that I think that type of thinking is also a mistake.
That's not even what I want to talk about, though. I have done security-related work professionally before, so maybe I look at this stuff from a different perspective than this guy does. What I want to talk about is this type of comments on Lemmy, when this situation got posted here under the title "Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances":
Non-malicious servers aren’t supposed to do what Pixelfed did.
Pixelfed got caught with its pants down
rtfm and do NOT give a rest to bad behaving software
dansup remains either incompetent for implementing badly something easy or toxic for federating ignoring what the federation requires
i completely blame pixelfed here: it breaks trust in transit and that’s unacceptable because it makes the system untrustworthy
periodic reminder to not touch dansup software and to move away from pixelfed and loops
dansup is not competent and quite problematic and it’s not even over
developers with less funding (even 0) contributed way more to fedi, they’re just less vocal
dansup is all bark no bite, stop falling for it
dansup showed quite some incompetence in handling security, delivering features, communicating clearly and honestly and treating properly third party devs
I sort of started out in the ensuing conversation just explaining the issues involved, because they are subtle, but there are people who are still sending me messages a day later insisting that Dansup is a big piece of shit and he broke the internet on purpose. They're also consistently upset, among other reasons, that he's getting paid because people like the stuff he made and gave away, and chose to back his Kickstarter. Very upset. I keep hearing about it.
This is not the first time, or even the first time with Dansup. From time to time, I see this with some kind of person on the Fediverse who's doing something. Usually someone who's giving away their time to do something for everyone else. Then there's some giant outcry that they are "problematic" or awful on purpose in some way. With Dansup at least, every time I've looked at it, it's mostly been trumped-up nonsense. The worst it ever is, in actuality, is "he got mad and posted an angry status HOW DARE HE." Usually it is based more or less on nothing.
When I see this, the pattern is almost always the same. People take some high-profile person, and some kind of grain-of-truth accusation that they did something bad, that really boils down to "they had a bad day one day" or something, if that, and they run with it all the way through the end zone and halfway to the next town over.
Dansup isn't just a person making free software, who sometimes posts angry unreasonable statuses or gets embroiled in drama for some reason because he is human and has human emotions. He's the worst. He is toxic and unhinged. He is keeping his Loops code secret and breaking his promises. He makes money. He broke privacy for everyone (no don't tell me any details about the protocol or why he didn't he broke it for everyone) (and don't tell me he fixed it in a few days and pushed out a new version that just makes it worse because he put it in the notes and it'll be hard for people to upgrade anyway so it doesn't count)
And so on.
Some particular moderator isn't just a person who sometimes makes poor moderation decisions and then doubles down on them. No, he is:
a racist and a zionist and will do whatever he can to delete pro-Palestinian posts, or posts that criticize Israel.
a vile, racist, zionist piece of shit, and anyone who defends or supports him is sitting at the table with him and accepts those labels for themselves.
And so on. The exact same pattern happened with a different lemmy.world mod who was extensively harassed for months for various made-up bullshit, all the way up until the time where he (related or not) decided to stop modding altogether.
It's weird. Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have? Why are people so un-amenable to someone trying to say "actually it's not that simple", to the point that a day later my inbox is still getting peppered with insistences that Dansup is the worst on this private-posts issue, and I'm completely wrong and incompetent for thinking otherwise and all the references I've been digging up and sending to try to illustrate the point are just more proof that I'm horrible?
Guys: Chill out.
I would just recommend, if you are one of these people that likes to double down on all this stuff and get all amped-up about how some particular fediverse person is "problematic" or "toxic" or various other vague insinuations, or you feel the need to bring up all kinds of past drama any time anything at all happens with the person, that you not.
I am probably guilty of this sometimes. I definitely like to give people hell sometimes, if in my opinion they are doing something that's causing a problem. But the extent to which the fediverse seems to like to do this stuff just seems really extreme to me, and a lot of times what it's based on is just weird petty bullying nonsense.
Just take it it with a grain of salt, too, if you see it, is also what I'm saying. Whether it comes from me or whoever. A lot of times, the issue doesn't look like such a huge deal once you strip away the histrionics and the assumption that everyone's being malicious on purpose. Doubly so if the emotion and the innuendo is running way ahead of what the actual facts are.
IMO, Dan has some responsibility but more of it lies with Mastodon and other microblogging software that labels this post type as "private", "followers only" or similar without any further explanation. It needs to be clear that it's dependent on good faith and competence of remote servers that may collect that information.
Moreover we need to do a better job of letting users know that anything posted on the internet, and especially anything posted to the fediverse where it's backed up on potentially thousands of servers, should be assumed to be publicly-visible and eternal. If nothing else, it will be backed up on the internet archive. If you want to communicate privately, this is the wrong place.
I wish there was a private social media platform but it seems like the closest we're going to get is Signal.
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I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say you're both wrong. Here me out.
As other commenters have said, there should never be any expectation of privacy on the fediverse. DMs here and private items are not actually private, they're quite literally blasted out to anyone who listens. I feel like I have to say that a lot. I actually like how Lemmy handles it, it warns you that it's unencrypted and that it recommends Matrix (and you can put your matrix handle on your profile).
However. I'm also disillusioned by Dansup. He made a great project with Pixelfed. It got off the ground and has a great following. However, I've read through the code, I've tried to spin it up, hell even tried to help contribute - but it's a spaghetti'd mess of unmaintainable code. What irks me is rather than dive in and fix the code, help those who honestly want to spin up his projects, he starts a completely separate project (off the same spaghetti'd base that barely scales), and goes on a whole PR junket talking about it. Then when I see people asking questions of his code or how to do things he usually jumps down their throats - or completely ignores them.
And honestly the biggest thing that irked me was that I didn't feel he gave credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people who work to make the fediverse work. Pixelfed is a great experience - but it's one of many all working together, and the developers are a huge chunk, but you have the infrastructure, us admins hosting, those out there vocalizing it, those trying to start communities, it's an ecosystem, and I just felt like he ignored the fediverse and instead pushed Pixelfed.
good reply but private items are not "quite literally blasted out to anyone who listens", AP spec has audience targeting and content gets sent capillarly, like email. a Note for bob gets sent ONLY to bob's server
as:Public content gets broadcasted by some software (relays) and inbox forwarded by others (mastodon, mitra).
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Some people have privacy expectations that are not realistic in an unencrypted, federated, heterogeneous environment run by hobbyist volunteers in their spare time.
It you have something private and sensitive to share with a small audience, make a group chat on Signal. Don't invite any reporters.
it's not unrealistic to keep trust at the server level. following your rationale, you can't trust my reply, or any, because any server could modify the content in transit. or hide posts. or make up posts from actors to make them look bad.
if you assume the network is badly behaved, fedi breaks down. it makes no sense to me that everything is taken for granted, except privacy.
servers will deliver, not modify, not make up stuff, not dos stuff, not spam you, but apparently obviously will leak your content?
fedi models trust at the server level, not user. i dont need to trust you, i need to trust just your server admin, and if i dont i defederate
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Who would've thunk that misusing the same type for both public and private posts (with a sprinkle of weird mention rules to determine the visibility) could backfire?
Well, definitely not Mastodon devs. Lemmy's current approach of using an entirely different type is much better.
If you're interested in some details, I recently wrote a comment about it: https://lemmyverse.link/lemmings.world/comment/14476151
lemmy's approach still relies on audience targeting for privacy, just like mastodon. using a distinct object type (which is off spec btw) is "more secure" just because nobody else knows what lemmy is doing
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lemmy's approach still relies on audience targeting for privacy, just like mastodon. using a distinct object type (which is off spec btw) is "more secure" just because nobody else knows what lemmy is doing
I said better, not more secure. It's not as easy to accidentally leak the message. It's equally easy to intentionally leak it.
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it's not unrealistic to keep trust at the server level. following your rationale, you can't trust my reply, or any, because any server could modify the content in transit. or hide posts. or make up posts from actors to make them look bad.
if you assume the network is badly behaved, fedi breaks down. it makes no sense to me that everything is taken for granted, except privacy.
servers will deliver, not modify, not make up stuff, not dos stuff, not spam you, but apparently obviously will leak your content?
fedi models trust at the server level, not user. i dont need to trust you, i need to trust just your server admin, and if i dont i defederate
There's a significant distinction between servers that are actively malicious as you're describing and servers that aren't fully compatible with certain features, or that are simply buggy.
Lemmy, for example modifies posts federated from other platforms to fit its format constraints. One of them is that a post from Mastodon with multiple images attached will only show one image on Lemmy. Mastodon does it too: inline images from a Lemmy post don't show on vanilla Mastodon.
I'll note that Lemmy's version numbers all start with 0. So do Piixelfed's. That implies the software is unfinished and unstable.
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So check it out: Mastodon decided to implement follower-only posts for their users. All good. They did it in a way where they were still broadcasting those posts (described as "private") in a format that other servers could easily wind up erroneously showing them to random people. That's not ideal.
Probably the clearest explanation of the root of the problem is this:
Something you may not know about Mastodon's privacy settings is that they are recommendations, not demands. This means that it is up to each individual server whether or not it chooses to enforce them. For example, you may mark your post with unlisted, which indicates that servers shouldn't display the post on their global timelines, but servers which don't implement the unlisted privacy setting still can (and do).
Servers don't necessarily disregard Mastodon's privacy settings for malicious reasons. Mastodon's privacy settings aren't a part of the original OStatus protocol, and servers which don't run a recent version of the Mastodon software simply aren't configured to recognize them. This means that unlisted, private, or even direct posts may end up in places you didn't expect on one of these servers—like in the public timeline, or a user's reblogs.
That is super relevant for "private" posts by Mastodon. They fall into the same category as how you've been voting on Lemmy posts and comments: This stuff seems private, because it's being hidden in your UI, but it's actually being broadcasted out to random untrusted servers behind the scenes, and some server software is going to expose it. It's simply going to happen. You need to be aware of that. Even if it's not shown in your UI, it is available.
Anyway, Pixelfed had a bug in its handling of those types of posts, which meant that in some circumstances it would show them to everyone. Somebody wrote on his blog about how his partner has been posting sensitive information as "private," and Pixelfed was exposing it, and how it's a massive problem. For some reason, Dansup (Pixelfed author) taking it seriously and fixing the problem and pushing out a new version within a few days only made this person more upset, because in his (IMO incorrect) opinion, the way Dansup had done it was wrong.
I think the blog-writer is just mistaken about some of the technical issues involved. It sounds like he's planning on telling his partner that it's still okay to be posting her private stuff on Mastodon, marked "private," now that Pixelfed and only Pixelfed has fixed the issue. I think that's a huge mistake for reasons that should be obvious. It sounds like he's very upset that Dansup made it explicit that he was fixing this issue, thinking that even exposing it in commit comments (which as we know get way more readership than blog posts) would mean people knew about it, and the less people that knew about it, the safer his partner's information would be since she is continuing to do this apparently. You will not be surprised to discover that I think that type of thinking is also a mistake.
That's not even what I want to talk about, though. I have done security-related work professionally before, so maybe I look at this stuff from a different perspective than this guy does. What I want to talk about is this type of comments on Lemmy, when this situation got posted here under the title "Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances":
Non-malicious servers aren’t supposed to do what Pixelfed did.
Pixelfed got caught with its pants down
rtfm and do NOT give a rest to bad behaving software
dansup remains either incompetent for implementing badly something easy or toxic for federating ignoring what the federation requires
i completely blame pixelfed here: it breaks trust in transit and that’s unacceptable because it makes the system untrustworthy
periodic reminder to not touch dansup software and to move away from pixelfed and loops
dansup is not competent and quite problematic and it’s not even over
developers with less funding (even 0) contributed way more to fedi, they’re just less vocal
dansup is all bark no bite, stop falling for it
dansup showed quite some incompetence in handling security, delivering features, communicating clearly and honestly and treating properly third party devs
I sort of started out in the ensuing conversation just explaining the issues involved, because they are subtle, but there are people who are still sending me messages a day later insisting that Dansup is a big piece of shit and he broke the internet on purpose. They're also consistently upset, among other reasons, that he's getting paid because people like the stuff he made and gave away, and chose to back his Kickstarter. Very upset. I keep hearing about it.
This is not the first time, or even the first time with Dansup. From time to time, I see this with some kind of person on the Fediverse who's doing something. Usually someone who's giving away their time to do something for everyone else. Then there's some giant outcry that they are "problematic" or awful on purpose in some way. With Dansup at least, every time I've looked at it, it's mostly been trumped-up nonsense. The worst it ever is, in actuality, is "he got mad and posted an angry status HOW DARE HE." Usually it is based more or less on nothing.
When I see this, the pattern is almost always the same. People take some high-profile person, and some kind of grain-of-truth accusation that they did something bad, that really boils down to "they had a bad day one day" or something, if that, and they run with it all the way through the end zone and halfway to the next town over.
Dansup isn't just a person making free software, who sometimes posts angry unreasonable statuses or gets embroiled in drama for some reason because he is human and has human emotions. He's the worst. He is toxic and unhinged. He is keeping his Loops code secret and breaking his promises. He makes money. He broke privacy for everyone (no don't tell me any details about the protocol or why he didn't he broke it for everyone) (and don't tell me he fixed it in a few days and pushed out a new version that just makes it worse because he put it in the notes and it'll be hard for people to upgrade anyway so it doesn't count)
And so on.
Some particular moderator isn't just a person who sometimes makes poor moderation decisions and then doubles down on them. No, he is:
a racist and a zionist and will do whatever he can to delete pro-Palestinian posts, or posts that criticize Israel.
a vile, racist, zionist piece of shit, and anyone who defends or supports him is sitting at the table with him and accepts those labels for themselves.
And so on. The exact same pattern happened with a different lemmy.world mod who was extensively harassed for months for various made-up bullshit, all the way up until the time where he (related or not) decided to stop modding altogether.
It's weird. Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have? Why are people so un-amenable to someone trying to say "actually it's not that simple", to the point that a day later my inbox is still getting peppered with insistences that Dansup is the worst on this private-posts issue, and I'm completely wrong and incompetent for thinking otherwise and all the references I've been digging up and sending to try to illustrate the point are just more proof that I'm horrible?
Guys: Chill out.
I would just recommend, if you are one of these people that likes to double down on all this stuff and get all amped-up about how some particular fediverse person is "problematic" or "toxic" or various other vague insinuations, or you feel the need to bring up all kinds of past drama any time anything at all happens with the person, that you not.
I am probably guilty of this sometimes. I definitely like to give people hell sometimes, if in my opinion they are doing something that's causing a problem. But the extent to which the fediverse seems to like to do this stuff just seems really extreme to me, and a lot of times what it's based on is just weird petty bullying nonsense.
Just take it it with a grain of salt, too, if you see it, is also what I'm saying. Whether it comes from me or whoever. A lot of times, the issue doesn't look like such a huge deal once you strip away the histrionics and the assumption that everyone's being malicious on purpose. Doubly so if the emotion and the innuendo is running way ahead of what the actual facts are.
A highly relevant post, particularly the part "Address the Elephants in the Room". Just imagine, for a moment, if all the people who were banned from Reddit for being too toxic were to come over here? In that case you would get... Lemmy.
Yet we are here as well. It is an odd mixture. And it is why we aren't really growing (well, barely) despite all the fuck-ups done by Huffman. Meanwhile e.g. Bluesky is really gathering people together! That's the difference that listening to people makes: they go where there's a nice environment, which addresses their concerns, in large part bc it makes them feel heard.
People most definitely don't come to Lemmy to be heard. Well, to be more precise, they do not stay once they learn that it isn't going to happen, without MAJOR efforts on their part to block a goodly fraction of the Lemmy userbase that will not control their own words, hence making anyone who does not enjoy listening to such need to put in the work to do that for them.
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A highly relevant post, particularly the part "Address the Elephants in the Room". Just imagine, for a moment, if all the people who were banned from Reddit for being too toxic were to come over here? In that case you would get... Lemmy.
Yet we are here as well. It is an odd mixture. And it is why we aren't really growing (well, barely) despite all the fuck-ups done by Huffman. Meanwhile e.g. Bluesky is really gathering people together! That's the difference that listening to people makes: they go where there's a nice environment, which addresses their concerns, in large part bc it makes them feel heard.
People most definitely don't come to Lemmy to be heard. Well, to be more precise, they do not stay once they learn that it isn't going to happen, without MAJOR efforts on their part to block a goodly fraction of the Lemmy userbase that will not control their own words, hence making anyone who does not enjoy listening to such need to put in the work to do that for them.
Yeah. That's one thing I think Piefed is really doing right. They're trying to make it so that normal people will have a fairly pleasant normal-person experience.
I think Lemmy's core developers including explicit acceptance for toxic online behavior, and some of the original core instances openly celebrating and modeling it, really may ruin the platform for the long term. And yes, you and dubvee are completely right as far as the lack of action in any respect by a lot of people who run the instances to do all that much of substance about the people who seem to want to ruin the experience on those instances.
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Yeah. That's one thing I think Piefed is really doing right. They're trying to make it so that normal people will have a fairly pleasant normal-person experience.
I think Lemmy's core developers including explicit acceptance for toxic online behavior, and some of the original core instances openly celebrating and modeling it, really may ruin the platform for the long term. And yes, you and dubvee are completely right as far as the lack of action in any respect by a lot of people who run the instances to do all that much of substance about the people who seem to want to ruin the experience on those instances.
You can read in my (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net some stories not only about that instance but also some for Lemmy.ml, including an incident where a mod told a user that they (the mod) wanted to kill them (the OP), then double and tripled down on that thought, all entirely protected by the admins (discussed further here).
When I first considered leaving Reddit, this kind of thing gave me strong pause, and it was only the fact that Kbin.social also existed that got me even a toe-hold into the Lemmyverse. This despite me not caring about Mastodon and thus any of its Microblogs, which lead to me mostly interacting with Lemmy magazines remotely, though with different sorting metrics which did help a little for me to see content that was not merely highly upvoted by people using Lemmy (including hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, etc.) and instead prioritized more by like-minded people using Kbin, and then later Mbin.
PieFed goes MUCH further, providing not merely different voting metrics on mostly the same content but actual tools that even pro-authoritarian Lemmy users want (categories of communities, combined comments across cross-posts, hashtags, etc.), as well as people who want the opposite, it's really extremely flexible.
And I think PieFed is the only hope for the Threadiverse to go mainstream. I'm not saying that I think that we necessarily will, or even that we all want to or should, just that if it were to happen, it won't happen with Lemmy. I'm currently at 100% of people I've told about it irl actively chiding me for having so much as recommended it, which makes a great deal of sense only once you realize that (i) a Google search pulls up lemmy.ml as the top instance, (ii) that instance shows Local rather than All by default, and thus (iii) what someone will be exposed to is content making fun of Western society. Mainstream normal people don't want that! I don't want it either! We learn how to block it, but mainstream normal people don't want to expend hours upon hours to make Lemmy usable - and by hours I mean like tens of, continually, as they keep swatting off the bullies, but there are always more.
The alternative would be to make better mod tools. Which on Lemmy are barely happening, extremely slowly. PieFed is still catching up to Lemmy in terms of base features though, e.g. there is a Preview option but only for posts but not for comments, and many Notifications point to things to read but then won't actually show you the thing when you click on it (due to many reasons, possibly having been removed in the meantime, or being hidden by an auto-collapse or auto-hide feature, or you've blocked all the users from an instance but nonetheless notifications are still sent, etc.) - i.e. it still needs some polish. Hence in the meantime I am not recommending Threadiverse tools to anyone irl atm, unless they are already reading something here and then I recommend to check out PieFed:-).
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So check it out: Mastodon decided to implement follower-only posts for their users. All good. They did it in a way where they were still broadcasting those posts (described as "private") in a format that other servers could easily wind up erroneously showing them to random people. That's not ideal.
Probably the clearest explanation of the root of the problem is this:
Something you may not know about Mastodon's privacy settings is that they are recommendations, not demands. This means that it is up to each individual server whether or not it chooses to enforce them. For example, you may mark your post with unlisted, which indicates that servers shouldn't display the post on their global timelines, but servers which don't implement the unlisted privacy setting still can (and do).
Servers don't necessarily disregard Mastodon's privacy settings for malicious reasons. Mastodon's privacy settings aren't a part of the original OStatus protocol, and servers which don't run a recent version of the Mastodon software simply aren't configured to recognize them. This means that unlisted, private, or even direct posts may end up in places you didn't expect on one of these servers—like in the public timeline, or a user's reblogs.
That is super relevant for "private" posts by Mastodon. They fall into the same category as how you've been voting on Lemmy posts and comments: This stuff seems private, because it's being hidden in your UI, but it's actually being broadcasted out to random untrusted servers behind the scenes, and some server software is going to expose it. It's simply going to happen. You need to be aware of that. Even if it's not shown in your UI, it is available.
Anyway, Pixelfed had a bug in its handling of those types of posts, which meant that in some circumstances it would show them to everyone. Somebody wrote on his blog about how his partner has been posting sensitive information as "private," and Pixelfed was exposing it, and how it's a massive problem. For some reason, Dansup (Pixelfed author) taking it seriously and fixing the problem and pushing out a new version within a few days only made this person more upset, because in his (IMO incorrect) opinion, the way Dansup had done it was wrong.
I think the blog-writer is just mistaken about some of the technical issues involved. It sounds like he's planning on telling his partner that it's still okay to be posting her private stuff on Mastodon, marked "private," now that Pixelfed and only Pixelfed has fixed the issue. I think that's a huge mistake for reasons that should be obvious. It sounds like he's very upset that Dansup made it explicit that he was fixing this issue, thinking that even exposing it in commit comments (which as we know get way more readership than blog posts) would mean people knew about it, and the less people that knew about it, the safer his partner's information would be since she is continuing to do this apparently. You will not be surprised to discover that I think that type of thinking is also a mistake.
That's not even what I want to talk about, though. I have done security-related work professionally before, so maybe I look at this stuff from a different perspective than this guy does. What I want to talk about is this type of comments on Lemmy, when this situation got posted here under the title "Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances":
Non-malicious servers aren’t supposed to do what Pixelfed did.
Pixelfed got caught with its pants down
rtfm and do NOT give a rest to bad behaving software
dansup remains either incompetent for implementing badly something easy or toxic for federating ignoring what the federation requires
i completely blame pixelfed here: it breaks trust in transit and that’s unacceptable because it makes the system untrustworthy
periodic reminder to not touch dansup software and to move away from pixelfed and loops
dansup is not competent and quite problematic and it’s not even over
developers with less funding (even 0) contributed way more to fedi, they’re just less vocal
dansup is all bark no bite, stop falling for it
dansup showed quite some incompetence in handling security, delivering features, communicating clearly and honestly and treating properly third party devs
I sort of started out in the ensuing conversation just explaining the issues involved, because they are subtle, but there are people who are still sending me messages a day later insisting that Dansup is a big piece of shit and he broke the internet on purpose. They're also consistently upset, among other reasons, that he's getting paid because people like the stuff he made and gave away, and chose to back his Kickstarter. Very upset. I keep hearing about it.
This is not the first time, or even the first time with Dansup. From time to time, I see this with some kind of person on the Fediverse who's doing something. Usually someone who's giving away their time to do something for everyone else. Then there's some giant outcry that they are "problematic" or awful on purpose in some way. With Dansup at least, every time I've looked at it, it's mostly been trumped-up nonsense. The worst it ever is, in actuality, is "he got mad and posted an angry status HOW DARE HE." Usually it is based more or less on nothing.
When I see this, the pattern is almost always the same. People take some high-profile person, and some kind of grain-of-truth accusation that they did something bad, that really boils down to "they had a bad day one day" or something, if that, and they run with it all the way through the end zone and halfway to the next town over.
Dansup isn't just a person making free software, who sometimes posts angry unreasonable statuses or gets embroiled in drama for some reason because he is human and has human emotions. He's the worst. He is toxic and unhinged. He is keeping his Loops code secret and breaking his promises. He makes money. He broke privacy for everyone (no don't tell me any details about the protocol or why he didn't he broke it for everyone) (and don't tell me he fixed it in a few days and pushed out a new version that just makes it worse because he put it in the notes and it'll be hard for people to upgrade anyway so it doesn't count)
And so on.
Some particular moderator isn't just a person who sometimes makes poor moderation decisions and then doubles down on them. No, he is:
a racist and a zionist and will do whatever he can to delete pro-Palestinian posts, or posts that criticize Israel.
a vile, racist, zionist piece of shit, and anyone who defends or supports him is sitting at the table with him and accepts those labels for themselves.
And so on. The exact same pattern happened with a different lemmy.world mod who was extensively harassed for months for various made-up bullshit, all the way up until the time where he (related or not) decided to stop modding altogether.
It's weird. Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have? Why are people so un-amenable to someone trying to say "actually it's not that simple", to the point that a day later my inbox is still getting peppered with insistences that Dansup is the worst on this private-posts issue, and I'm completely wrong and incompetent for thinking otherwise and all the references I've been digging up and sending to try to illustrate the point are just more proof that I'm horrible?
Guys: Chill out.
I would just recommend, if you are one of these people that likes to double down on all this stuff and get all amped-up about how some particular fediverse person is "problematic" or "toxic" or various other vague insinuations, or you feel the need to bring up all kinds of past drama any time anything at all happens with the person, that you not.
I am probably guilty of this sometimes. I definitely like to give people hell sometimes, if in my opinion they are doing something that's causing a problem. But the extent to which the fediverse seems to like to do this stuff just seems really extreme to me, and a lot of times what it's based on is just weird petty bullying nonsense.
Just take it it with a grain of salt, too, if you see it, is also what I'm saying. Whether it comes from me or whoever. A lot of times, the issue doesn't look like such a huge deal once you strip away the histrionics and the assumption that everyone's being malicious on purpose. Doubly so if the emotion and the innuendo is running way ahead of what the actual facts are.
I think I can contribute something to the "privacy" aspect. But I'll say first that I have noticed the same thing. There are some toxic behaviors that feel more common in these circles than what I have experienced elsewhere.
There is a lot of confusion around European data protection rights and privacy. EG the GDPR is often wrongly called a privacy regulation. In reality, privacy and EU data protection rights are entirely separate.
In the Charter of fundamental rights of the European Union, you will find privacy in Article 7 and data protection in Article 8.
::: spoiler spoiler
Article 7Respect for private and family life
Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.Article 8
Protection of personal data
- Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.
- Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the
person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to
data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified. - Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority.
:::
EU data protection works similar to copyright in that you have rights over data. Personal data is defined as any data that is "directly or indirectly related" to you (GDPR). It does not matter if the data is public or private, sensitive or banal. It doesn't even matter if the data can be connected to your real identity. That's quite unlike what one would think of as privacy.
So, it does not matter if people expected their communications to be secure or not. "Reasonable expectation of privacy" is a concept in US law.
Comments, posts and DMs are personal data because they are connected to a user who is a person. If any other person is mentioned, then this mention is their personal data. You could even argue that some post or comment also becomes someone else's personal data when they reply to it. Such texts cease to be personal data only when the connection is irreversibly broken. As long as the connection can be restored, it remains personal data, even if that requires access to information that isn't readily available.
When a DM is sent to some unauthorized recipient, that is literally a violation of the senders fundamental rights. In truth, this is relatively serious compared to some other stuff that causes outrage or gets the authorities involved.
It might have been legally required to notify the authorities of such a data breach within 72 hours.
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So check it out: Mastodon decided to implement follower-only posts for their users. All good. They did it in a way where they were still broadcasting those posts (described as "private") in a format that other servers could easily wind up erroneously showing them to random people. That's not ideal.
Probably the clearest explanation of the root of the problem is this:
Something you may not know about Mastodon's privacy settings is that they are recommendations, not demands. This means that it is up to each individual server whether or not it chooses to enforce them. For example, you may mark your post with unlisted, which indicates that servers shouldn't display the post on their global timelines, but servers which don't implement the unlisted privacy setting still can (and do).
Servers don't necessarily disregard Mastodon's privacy settings for malicious reasons. Mastodon's privacy settings aren't a part of the original OStatus protocol, and servers which don't run a recent version of the Mastodon software simply aren't configured to recognize them. This means that unlisted, private, or even direct posts may end up in places you didn't expect on one of these servers—like in the public timeline, or a user's reblogs.
That is super relevant for "private" posts by Mastodon. They fall into the same category as how you've been voting on Lemmy posts and comments: This stuff seems private, because it's being hidden in your UI, but it's actually being broadcasted out to random untrusted servers behind the scenes, and some server software is going to expose it. It's simply going to happen. You need to be aware of that. Even if it's not shown in your UI, it is available.
Anyway, Pixelfed had a bug in its handling of those types of posts, which meant that in some circumstances it would show them to everyone. Somebody wrote on his blog about how his partner has been posting sensitive information as "private," and Pixelfed was exposing it, and how it's a massive problem. For some reason, Dansup (Pixelfed author) taking it seriously and fixing the problem and pushing out a new version within a few days only made this person more upset, because in his (IMO incorrect) opinion, the way Dansup had done it was wrong.
I think the blog-writer is just mistaken about some of the technical issues involved. It sounds like he's planning on telling his partner that it's still okay to be posting her private stuff on Mastodon, marked "private," now that Pixelfed and only Pixelfed has fixed the issue. I think that's a huge mistake for reasons that should be obvious. It sounds like he's very upset that Dansup made it explicit that he was fixing this issue, thinking that even exposing it in commit comments (which as we know get way more readership than blog posts) would mean people knew about it, and the less people that knew about it, the safer his partner's information would be since she is continuing to do this apparently. You will not be surprised to discover that I think that type of thinking is also a mistake.
That's not even what I want to talk about, though. I have done security-related work professionally before, so maybe I look at this stuff from a different perspective than this guy does. What I want to talk about is this type of comments on Lemmy, when this situation got posted here under the title "Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances":
Non-malicious servers aren’t supposed to do what Pixelfed did.
Pixelfed got caught with its pants down
rtfm and do NOT give a rest to bad behaving software
dansup remains either incompetent for implementing badly something easy or toxic for federating ignoring what the federation requires
i completely blame pixelfed here: it breaks trust in transit and that’s unacceptable because it makes the system untrustworthy
periodic reminder to not touch dansup software and to move away from pixelfed and loops
dansup is not competent and quite problematic and it’s not even over
developers with less funding (even 0) contributed way more to fedi, they’re just less vocal
dansup is all bark no bite, stop falling for it
dansup showed quite some incompetence in handling security, delivering features, communicating clearly and honestly and treating properly third party devs
I sort of started out in the ensuing conversation just explaining the issues involved, because they are subtle, but there are people who are still sending me messages a day later insisting that Dansup is a big piece of shit and he broke the internet on purpose. They're also consistently upset, among other reasons, that he's getting paid because people like the stuff he made and gave away, and chose to back his Kickstarter. Very upset. I keep hearing about it.
This is not the first time, or even the first time with Dansup. From time to time, I see this with some kind of person on the Fediverse who's doing something. Usually someone who's giving away their time to do something for everyone else. Then there's some giant outcry that they are "problematic" or awful on purpose in some way. With Dansup at least, every time I've looked at it, it's mostly been trumped-up nonsense. The worst it ever is, in actuality, is "he got mad and posted an angry status HOW DARE HE." Usually it is based more or less on nothing.
When I see this, the pattern is almost always the same. People take some high-profile person, and some kind of grain-of-truth accusation that they did something bad, that really boils down to "they had a bad day one day" or something, if that, and they run with it all the way through the end zone and halfway to the next town over.
Dansup isn't just a person making free software, who sometimes posts angry unreasonable statuses or gets embroiled in drama for some reason because he is human and has human emotions. He's the worst. He is toxic and unhinged. He is keeping his Loops code secret and breaking his promises. He makes money. He broke privacy for everyone (no don't tell me any details about the protocol or why he didn't he broke it for everyone) (and don't tell me he fixed it in a few days and pushed out a new version that just makes it worse because he put it in the notes and it'll be hard for people to upgrade anyway so it doesn't count)
And so on.
Some particular moderator isn't just a person who sometimes makes poor moderation decisions and then doubles down on them. No, he is:
a racist and a zionist and will do whatever he can to delete pro-Palestinian posts, or posts that criticize Israel.
a vile, racist, zionist piece of shit, and anyone who defends or supports him is sitting at the table with him and accepts those labels for themselves.
And so on. The exact same pattern happened with a different lemmy.world mod who was extensively harassed for months for various made-up bullshit, all the way up until the time where he (related or not) decided to stop modding altogether.
It's weird. Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have? Why are people so un-amenable to someone trying to say "actually it's not that simple", to the point that a day later my inbox is still getting peppered with insistences that Dansup is the worst on this private-posts issue, and I'm completely wrong and incompetent for thinking otherwise and all the references I've been digging up and sending to try to illustrate the point are just more proof that I'm horrible?
Guys: Chill out.
I would just recommend, if you are one of these people that likes to double down on all this stuff and get all amped-up about how some particular fediverse person is "problematic" or "toxic" or various other vague insinuations, or you feel the need to bring up all kinds of past drama any time anything at all happens with the person, that you not.
I am probably guilty of this sometimes. I definitely like to give people hell sometimes, if in my opinion they are doing something that's causing a problem. But the extent to which the fediverse seems to like to do this stuff just seems really extreme to me, and a lot of times what it's based on is just weird petty bullying nonsense.
Just take it it with a grain of salt, too, if you see it, is also what I'm saying. Whether it comes from me or whoever. A lot of times, the issue doesn't look like such a huge deal once you strip away the histrionics and the assumption that everyone's being malicious on purpose. Doubly so if the emotion and the innuendo is running way ahead of what the actual facts are.
Let's clarify something here. Mastodon follower only posts don't have the "public pseudo user" addressed, do they?
That's the important piece that this whole thing hinges upon
If it is present, Mastodon is a fault. If not, Pixelfed messed up.
No?
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I’m pretty sure they do not. However, ActivityPub specifically says that no particular secrecy behavior is defined for even posts with no recipients at all (it’s in a green highlighted note under 7.1 I think). I would interpret that to mean that no particular secrecy behavior is guaranteed for posts without #public as a recipient, also.
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it's not unrealistic to keep trust at the server level. following your rationale, you can't trust my reply, or any, because any server could modify the content in transit. or hide posts. or make up posts from actors to make them look bad.
if you assume the network is badly behaved, fedi breaks down. it makes no sense to me that everything is taken for granted, except privacy.
servers will deliver, not modify, not make up stuff, not dos stuff, not spam you, but apparently obviously will leak your content?
fedi models trust at the server level, not user. i dont need to trust you, i need to trust just your server admin, and if i dont i defederate
if you assume the network is badly behaved, fedi breaks down. it makes no sense to me that everything is taken for granted, except privacy.
This is backwards in my opinion.
What you described is exactly how it works. Everything in the network is potentially badly behaved. You need to put on rate limits, digital signatures for activities back to actors, blocks for particular instances, and so on, specifically because whenever you are talking with someone else on the network, they might be badly behaved.
In general, it’s okay in practice to be a little bit loose with it. If you get some spam from a not-yet-blocked instance, or you send some server a message which it has a bug and it doesn’t deliver, then it is okay. But, if you’re sending a message which can compromise someone’s privacy if mishandled, then all of a sudden you have to care on a stricter level. Because it’s not harmless anymore if the server which is receiving the message is broken (or malicious).
So yes, privacy is different. In practice it’s usually okay to just let users know that nothing they’re sending is really private. Email works that way, Lemmy DMs work that way, it’s okay. But if you start telling people their stuff is really private, and you’re still letting it interact with untrusted servers (which is all of them), you have to suddenly care on this whole other level and do all sorts of E2EE and verification stuff, or else you’re lying to your users. In my opinion.
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if you assume the network is badly behaved, fedi breaks down. it makes no sense to me that everything is taken for granted, except privacy.
This is backwards in my opinion.
What you described is exactly how it works. Everything in the network is potentially badly behaved. You need to put on rate limits, digital signatures for activities back to actors, blocks for particular instances, and so on, specifically because whenever you are talking with someone else on the network, they might be badly behaved.
In general, it’s okay in practice to be a little bit loose with it. If you get some spam from a not-yet-blocked instance, or you send some server a message which it has a bug and it doesn’t deliver, then it is okay. But, if you’re sending a message which can compromise someone’s privacy if mishandled, then all of a sudden you have to care on a stricter level. Because it’s not harmless anymore if the server which is receiving the message is broken (or malicious).
So yes, privacy is different. In practice it’s usually okay to just let users know that nothing they’re sending is really private. Email works that way, Lemmy DMs work that way, it’s okay. But if you start telling people their stuff is really private, and you’re still letting it interact with untrusted servers (which is all of them), you have to suddenly care on this whole other level and do all sorts of E2EE and verification stuff, or else you’re lying to your users. In my opinion.
taking care of bad servers is instance admin business, you're conflating the user concerns with the instance owner concerns
generally this thread and previous ones have such bad takes on fedi structure: a federated and decentralized system must delegate responsibility and trust
if you're concerned about spam, that's mostly instance owner business. it's like that with every service: even signal has spam, and signal staff deals with it, not you. you're delegating trust
if you want privacy, on signal you need to delegate privacy to software. on fedi to server owners too, but that's the only extra trust you need to pay
sending private messages is up to you. if i send a note and address it only to you, i'm delegating trust to you to not leak it, to the software to keep it confidential, and to the server owner to not snoop on it. on signal you still need to trust the software and the recipient
this whole "nothing is private on fedi" is a bad black/white answer to a gray issue. nothing is private ever, how can you trust AES and RSA? do you know every computer passing your packet is safe from side chain attacks to break your encryption? you claimed to work in security in another thread, i would expect you to know the concept of "threat modeling"
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