Dear Fedi friends,
Good morning from #FOSDEM!
Yesterday was pure magic: I loved every single presentation in the Social Web devroom, with devs and Fediverse champions sharing their inspiring work.
I didn’t post anything because I was so absorbed in all the talks (plus @liaizon and @Sascha did a fantastic job chronicling the event).
I can’t stop thinking about one of @benpate’s closing slides:
“Every single thing you do to improve the Fediverse is a win for humanity”
YES! 🙌
@_elena @liaizon @Sascha @benpate
We need to be careful with this Fandom-ization of the fediverse. Fandom creates blind followers and makes critical thinkers potential enemies of the groupthink.
Mastodon is a giant dangerous experiment that does NOT protect user data and has no e2e encryption!
This is NOT a win for humanity, but creating the next big brother network masked as "cool b/c federated".
We need to build privacy aware networks now!
Two thoughts on this:
Encryption will only be for private conversations. I don’t know what value there would be for encrypting public communications. SIGNING makes sense, but encrypting? No.
Also, this is not on Mastodon, and I can’t say when they’d ever implement it. It’s Fediverse: Bonfire, Emissary, and any other project that follows us. It’ll be a new use case for our open network tech 🤘🏻
@benpate @fedifox @_elena @liaizon @Sascha
Apologies, I did burst in with an opinion and didn't properly read the thread :/
Yes for DMs/PMs and ofc by default for most services.
It's definitely nontrivial with potentially many participants esp people joining a convo. Ring signatures seem like the natural fit.
@Nymnympseudonymm @fedifox @_elena @liaizon @Sascha
No apologies necessary 😀
On groups and group size, this is the main reason that the MLS protocol was chosen for the spec. It uses a “ratchet tree” structure for generating the keys for each group. It’s a LOT of math, but adding/removing people to a group is just an O(log n) operation - as in it’s VERY fast and efficient. I linked to the MLS spec from my site, if you want to read up: https://emissary.dev/e2ee
You’re very right. The Fediverse is not a cure-all, complete solutions for the problems we face. But it is, at least, a platform the we own. It will take many good decisions to turn it into what we need it to be.
On privacy, have you seen this? https://emissary.dev/e2ee
We’re working to bring real privacy, and truly private messages on the Fediverse. It’s a small step, but I believe it’s in the right direction.
cc @fedifox
"Mastodon is a giant dangerous experiment that does NOT protect user data and has no e2e encryption!
This is NOT a win for humanity, but creating the next big brother network masked as "cool b/c federated"."
I hate to actually Be That Guy to Well Actually go there, but maybe there are some people on #Mastodon / the #Fediverse who have been online long enough and paid enough attention to actually be able to care for ourselves
Ya think?
Or nah?
Personally, I had a UNIX shell login account on SDF dot org back in 1991
WAIS, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, UseNet
NCSA Mosaic about 1993
What were you doing online in 1991?
cc @benpate
Dial-up BBS-es, baby! I knew I’d find my people here! 😁😁
Yeah never did much BBS for some reason I can't remember though
Lotta UseNet
Mostly something like comp/OS/* comp/OS/Linux/* and comp/Networking/* or something like that...
Been a while...
Same. I have stories from Usenet….
Elena Rossini ⁂
Yuson14
Fedi Fox
Nymnympseudonym
Ben Pate 🤘🏻
Chris 🦑
FinchHaven sfba