The fediverse has a bullying problem
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Mostly I agree but I disagree in this way:
Face to face, especially in a small community, some people take it upon themselves to establish what they see as the right and proper rules for the community. Everyone must have a grassy lawn cut to exactly three inches is kind of the least terrible end of this.
“Queer people are a danger to our children”, “Everyone must be in a straight, monogamous relationship, that produces children who aren’t autistic or disabled in any way,” etc. and, because it’s in person, they have much more power to ruin lives.
We see some of that behavior in online communities but people generally have much more ability to “vote with their feet” or even abstain online.
I had Instagram for five minutes before they started trying to share my account with acquaintances who didn’t know I was queer. (Which is a crime as far as I’m concerned but not relevant.) I immediately closed my account. Imagine that had been a neighborhood I’d just moved into. It might not even be possible for me to move before I faced months of the real life consequences of being forcibly outed by a neighbor.
There’s a veneer of politeness in meat space. Sometimes there’s more than a veneer to it. But often not.
They're nasty pieces of shit when they don't have to look at the person they're hurting or putting in danger, but that only supports my theory. There's an empathy disconnect that's created when there isn't a human face or voice immediately in front of them. Once they aren't in danger of an in-person interaction all the venom comes out. Online, that's basically all of our interactions.
I should point out the phenomenon where a minority in a community will magically become "one of the good ones" so that the bigots can continue hating minorities while empathizing with their neighbor. This is also becoming less common as we grow more isolated from each other and everyone moves online, destroying the potential for that face-to-face interaction.
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They should implement some form of pgp into private posts so only folks with the right key can decrypt
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Agreed. Reddit and Twitter were bad for bullying, doxxing, or just general nastiness, I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen on Mastodon, or the Fediverse in general, but it’s nothing like as bad.
Until someone does something not FOSS'y or anti-linux.
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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.
When I first started the reading I figured the person being bullied was the woman who was upset with dan because her concern about disclosure wasn’t really reasonable. I don’t think the bullying problem is innate to the fediverse, and thankfully we have a lot of tools to safely navigate the fediverse and tune out the abuse.
But there is a not insignificant portion of folks on here that are here because they were banned or warned on mainstream platforms because they couldn’t regulate themselves and still aren’t regulating themselves.
The vast majority of people I’ve came across are genuinely kind. Dansup doesn’t exactly follow best practices in his development which I think causes a lot of strife in the segment of the fedi population who can’t regulate when someone does something they don’t agree with.
I don’t agree with how he has handled loops so I just don’t use it. I don’t think ill of Dan at all.
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I'm not sure you can make that conclusion. This isn't a real vulnerability, and this isn't a surprise to anybody who knows how the AP protocol works. Dansup didn't reveal anything that was previously unknown, the blog author just has an axe to grind. It's unfair to assume that an actual 0 day vulnerability would have been treated the same way.
I’m genuinely curious what you would call this and what distinguishes it from a vulnerability.
Leaving aside responsibility, the system could have been set up in a way that wouldn’t have exposed user data but wasn’t. This is now fixed and user data isn’t exposed via this method any longer. What is the right word for what it was at the moment this flaw was discovered?
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This guy also being a perpetrator of bullying because he didn't like moderation decisions makes this post a bit ironic though
Yeah, I alluded to that when I said I'm probably guilty of it sometimes.
A reasonable person could say that I tend to bully the mods when I disagree with something they've done. I do think that when you sign up to control people's experience and delete messages you don't agree with, you're signing up to have your decisions criticized. Reasonably or not. It's absurd to say that no one is allowed to get upset or air their grievances when the moderators apply moderation in a way that they don't like, because the end state of that setup is Reddit. But in fairness you are not wrong, sometimes I take it too far, and I think I should cool it at least a little with getting embittered about people moderating me in ways I don't like.
Also, just for the record I've never had any issue on any level with you specifically. My whole anger at one of your moderators posting electoral propaganda and then banning people who disagreed with it, was that I thought he was hijacking his way into the slrpnk good graces for his own agenda, not that that was the intent behind the whole instance or anything. I've started being snarky towards the instance as a whole since the slrpnk admin team for some reason came out swinging hard to defend him on that, and then also gave out some further deletions and bans afterwards that I thought were equally silly, but it was more because I felt like you were supposed to be one of the good instances that supported people being able to have the conversations they wanted to have, and move the whole network in a good direction. I definitely wasn't happy about it or looking for that embittered interaction.
(For context for anyone who's confused, here are some instances of what might be called bullying that I've done previously. The second one in particular sort of makes me cringe to post here, because it's exactly the kind of sour grapes innuendo that I'm complaining about when people aim it at Dansup.)
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This is exactly why ActivityPub makes for such a mediocre replacement for the big social media apps. You have to let go of any assumptions that at least some of your data remains exclusive to the ad algorithm and accept that everything you post or look at or scroll past is being recorded by malicious servers. Which, in turn, kind of makes it a failure, as replacing traditional social media is exactly what it's supposed to do.
The Fediverse also lacks tooling to filter out the idiots and assholes. That kind of moderation is a lot easier when you have a centralised database and moderation staff on board, but the network of tiny servers with each their own moderation capabilities will promote the worst behaviour as much as the best behaviour.
But really, the worst part is the UX for apps. Fediverse apps suck at setting expectations. Of course Lemmy publishes when you've upvoted what posts, that's essential for how the protocol works, but what other Reddit clone has a public voting history? Same with anyone using any form of the word "private" or even "unlisted", as those only apply in a perfect world where servers have no bugs and where there are no malicious servers.
Just because the average user doesn’t consider whether they should trust the platform, doesn’t mean the fediverse is less trustworthy. It’s not. Nothing online should be considered trustworthy if it’s not encrypted.
You still have to consider whether Facebook is trustworthy with your posts and click data, whether the thousands of advertisers they sell your info too are trustworthy. Whether the persons you message are trustworthy and that they won’t get hacked.
About the same risks as with trusting a fediverse instance operator except they don’t have the same motivations to sell your data.
I’m not sure if you are aware of fediblock which allows instance operators to coordinate banning and defederating bad actors from the network. And of course you can always mute or block any user or instance you wish independently of your instance’s block list.
Your data being leaked to “malicious servers” in this case also requires approving a follow to a user on that instance or having your profile set to public (and at that point you should expect your content to be public)
I do think you are right that it is a paradigm shift of thinking for new users who aren’t familiar with federation. But I think anyone who wants to join will just either have to give up control to big platforms and stay put or shift their thinking.
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You actually could do this kind of thing with AP. It’s designed to give a key pair to every user to use for signing all their activities, so so the some careful redesign, you might be able to do something like have the browser authenticating the user’s identity in a way that the server isn’t able to do, or even messages being sent encrypted in a way that the server can’t read.
In practice, the server keeps the user’s private keys, and moving away from that model would be difficult. But you could in theory redesign it away from that.
Mastodon moving to the ActivityPod (I think that’s the proposal name) Nomadic Identity/DID model like bluesky where the user holds their private key will be essential at some point if mastodon is going to compete with bluesky seriously for twitter refugees
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Just because the average user doesn’t consider whether they should trust the platform, doesn’t mean the fediverse is less trustworthy. It’s not. Nothing online should be considered trustworthy if it’s not encrypted.
You still have to consider whether Facebook is trustworthy with your posts and click data, whether the thousands of advertisers they sell your info too are trustworthy. Whether the persons you message are trustworthy and that they won’t get hacked.
About the same risks as with trusting a fediverse instance operator except they don’t have the same motivations to sell your data.
I’m not sure if you are aware of fediblock which allows instance operators to coordinate banning and defederating bad actors from the network. And of course you can always mute or block any user or instance you wish independently of your instance’s block list.
Your data being leaked to “malicious servers” in this case also requires approving a follow to a user on that instance or having your profile set to public (and at that point you should expect your content to be public)
I do think you are right that it is a paradigm shift of thinking for new users who aren’t familiar with federation. But I think anyone who wants to join will just either have to give up control to big platforms and stay put or shift their thinking.
Building trust is hard. It's easier to trust a few companies than to trust a million unknown servers. It's why I prefer Wikipedia over amazingnotskgeneratedatalltopicalinformarion.biz when I'm looking up simple facts.
Furthermore, Facebook isn't selling data directly. At least, not if they're following the law. They got caught doing and fined doing that once and it's not their main mode of operation. Like Google, their data is their gold mine, selling it directly would be corporate suicide. They simply provide advertisers with spots to put an ad, but when it comes to data processing, they're doing all the work before advertisers get a chance to look at a user's profile.
On the other hand, scraping ActivityPub for advertisers would be trivial. It'd be silly to go through the trouble to set up something like Threads if all you want is information, a basic AP server that follows ever Lemmy community and soaks up gigabytes an hour can be written as a weekend project.
Various Chinese data centers are scraping the hell out of my server, and they carry referer headers from other Fediverse servers. I've blocked half of East Asia and new IP addresses keep popping up. Whatever data you think Facebook may be selling, someone else is already selling based on your Fediverse behaviour. Whatever Petal Search and all the others are doing, I don't believe for a second they're being honest about it.
Most Fediverse software defaults to federation and accepting inbound follow requests. At least, Mastodon, Lemmy, GoToSocial, Kbin, and one of those fish named mastodonlikes did. Profiles are often public by default too. The vulnerability applies to a large section of the Fediverse default settings.
I'd like to think people would switch to the Fediverse despite the paradigm shift. The privacy risks are still there if there's only one company managing them, so I'd prefer it if people used appropriate tools for sharing private stuff. I think platforms like Circles (a Matrix-based social media system) which leverage encryption to ensure nobody can read things they shouldn't have been able to, are much more appropriate. Perhaps a similar system can be laid on top of ActivityPub as well (after all, every entity already has a public/private key pair).
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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'm OOTL, who is Dansup? What does this person have to do with private posts not being private?
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I'm OOTL, who is Dansup? What does this person have to do with private posts not being private?
Dansup is a developer who made Pixelfed and Loops.
Depending on who you ask, he either fucked up Pixelfed in a way that exposed Mastodon users' private posts, or else Mastodon implemented private posts poorly and he got caught in the crossfire. I'm firmly in the second camp, so much so that I think it's misleading to describe it in that both-sides type of way, but regardless, that is the lay of the land of the drama.
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When I first started the reading I figured the person being bullied was the woman who was upset with dan because her concern about disclosure wasn’t really reasonable. I don’t think the bullying problem is innate to the fediverse, and thankfully we have a lot of tools to safely navigate the fediverse and tune out the abuse.
But there is a not insignificant portion of folks on here that are here because they were banned or warned on mainstream platforms because they couldn’t regulate themselves and still aren’t regulating themselves.
The vast majority of people I’ve came across are genuinely kind. Dansup doesn’t exactly follow best practices in his development which I think causes a lot of strife in the segment of the fedi population who can’t regulate when someone does something they don’t agree with.
I don’t agree with how he has handled loops so I just don’t use it. I don’t think ill of Dan at all.
But there is a not insignificant portion of folks on here that are here because they were banned or warned on mainstream platforms because they couldn’t regulate themselves and still aren’t regulating themselves.
What?
Plenty of people on mainstream platforms are obnoxious. Twitter and Reddit in particular are hives of villainy that make anything available on Fedi platforms look childish. Why do you think people are here because they were ejected from mainstream platforms?
Dansup doesn’t exactly follow best practices in his development which I think causes a lot of strife
What?
Can you elaborate?
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Dansup is a developer who made Pixelfed and Loops.
Depending on who you ask, he either fucked up Pixelfed in a way that exposed Mastodon users' private posts, or else Mastodon implemented private posts poorly and he got caught in the crossfire. I'm firmly in the second camp, so much so that I think it's misleading to describe it in that both-sides type of way, but regardless, that is the lay of the land of the drama.
Never trust the client, right? In this case, the client is another server, run by different people. If software A can fuck up software B, software B is the one that should be fixed with better security. Thanks for clarifying btw!
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People get so weird about Dansup.
This is in part because he's in public trainwreck mode fairly often.
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Completely agree.
It is fine if you want to add privacy to a federated platform. If you wanted to, you would need to think through how to do it (probably it would involve either adding something specific and very carefully laid-out to the ActivityPub spec, or just doing like Lemmy does and switching to a whole other protocol like Matrix and warning the users that anything over ActivityPub is not private). Neither of those is what Mastodon did, but now they’re going around telling users they can have private posts, which is why I think they’re ultimately at fault in the situation that kicked off this whole shebang.
If any dev should be getting roasted, it's Gargron, for his many bad decisions over the years.
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Never trust the client, right? In this case, the client is another server, run by different people. If software A can fuck up software B, software B is the one that should be fixed with better security. Thanks for clarifying btw!
Yes. That is 100% my feeling.
Happy to be of service.
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Just a random thought, if there is a need for privacy wouldn't it be possible to create public / private encryption key for users so messages can be encrypted and exchanged.
This way what would be public is that there's an exchange but nobody would be able to know what was said. It would make it at least message content private.
To make it a step further could exchange between servers also use it to encrypt which users exchange private message. I am thinking it could make it fully private then. Only sender and receiver servers could know which users were private messaging.
The furry engineer who writes cryptography posts is working on this. Turns out it is not so simple in practice.
https://soatok.blog/category/technology/open-source/fediverse-e2ee-project/
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Until someone does something not FOSS'y or anti-linux.
Or you try to tell them the government they are cheering for is not a leftist one, people here loves to defend them based only on the propaganda that reaches them and get MAD if you don't join the yes-wave.
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See, but as I was saying above about the privacy stuff, the perception is supposed to be that this is somehow "the alogrithm's fault" or caused on purpose by corporate media to boost engagement.
Even your take is letting Fedi design off the hook, IMO. The answer here isn't "oh, well, what can you do?" it's designing proper moderation tools.
I know people get mad when you praise Bluesky around these parts, but they have an actually good block system, compared to Masto, Lemmy and Fedi in general. It really helps cut this crap short.
And the main reason Bluesky can have that is because it's not actually decentralized.
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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.
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.
Anyone who's ever touched the Mastodon dev process knows that Gargron is much the same, FWIW, minus getting angry in public. These days I just have to shake my head at all the bright-eyed bushy-tailed noobs updating issues on the Mastodon repo, because those of us who've been around since the start know exactly how far that's gonna go in nearly all cases - and in the cases it does go anywhere, it'll be because Gargron implemented something similar with zero discussion and no credit where credit is due.
But yeah, follow Dansup long enough and you are guaranteed to see some regrettable behavior on main.
