Matt BlazeI will admit I still don't understand what's so offensive about my pointing out the unsafe, confusing semantics of the Mastodon PM mechanism, or why this topic seems to provoke so much anger.
Basically, I have learned nothing from your yelling.
Anyway, while I don't understand why this pisses some people off so much, or why they take my critique of the Mastodon PM semantics so personally, it's now very clear that it does piss some people off quite a bit.
But I'm not going to let that stop me. I'm an expert on security and privacy. And my job is, in large part, to act as a public intellectual. Warning people of dangerous designs that could cause them harm is what I do. If doing so makes me an asshole, so be it.
It's sometimes difficult to remember that communications platforms, including social media platforms like this one, attract a very wide variety of users with a wide range of circumstances. The same systems we might use only for trivial chitchat are likely also being used by political dissidents, labor organizers, and others for whom mistakes can have very serious consequences.
Making social media platforms reliably usable is important, even if it might not seem so to us personally.
Darren du Nord@mattblaze We're all going to need public keys, aren't we.
Prentiss Riddle 🎛@darren @mattblaze Naive question: how hard would it be to add an "end-to-end encrypted DM" button to a Mastodon client? The idea being to avoid the messiness of non-tech users knowing how to use public key software.
End-to-end is the client's job anyway, right? So the servers need not know or care.
emberquill 
End-to-end is the client's job anyway, right? So the servers need not know or care.
I use Mastodon mostly via web browsers so I have no idea how that would even work for me. My "client" is just Firefox. This would work if the client was always the same for everyone, but there are far too many different browsers and apps for accessing the Fediverse.
Mastodon isn't really built for private communication so redesigning it to be capable of that would not be a simple task. And then you have all the other kinds of sites on the Fediverse to contend with.
tl;dr if any Mastodon app added E2EE DMs I guarantee a significant portion of people you follow wouldn't be able to receive them due to using a different server or app.
@emberquill @darren @mattblaze All good questions. WhatsApp claims to do end-to-end encryption in a web browser, so that part is at least theoretically possible even without a dedicated client app.
Elena ``of Valhalla''@pzriddle @darren @mattblaze would that button work when the receiver is not on mastodon? and if not, how would it fail?
there are many more platforms that aren't mastodon on the fediverse, and they aren't necessarily tailored to the same set of expectations.
On the other hand, in my profile on friendica there is a field for an xmpp account: if I wanted to receive e2e communications from strangers I could fill that in, and it would work with no need to add anything to a protocol, AP, that is not really designed for that.
Improving the interface of that protocol switch sounds to me a much more promising avenue.
@valhalla @darren @mattblaze The starting point for this thread was that Mastodon offers zero privacy for DMs, but users are likely not to understand that and so may put themselves in harm's way - particularly the most vulnerable.
I wonder whether one solution could be to take your suggestion of putting communication handles in the profile, and then remove the DM feature from Mastodon entirely.
@pzriddle @darren @mattblaze I think that solution could work better than adding e2e to mastodon DMs