does lemmy have a chat and dms like reddit?
does lemmy have a chat and dms like reddit?
Yes. Click on any person’s username and under/next their bio there is a button to send a direct message. Not really a live chat thing yet, lemmy does not have the backend for that.
Note, DM’s over Lemmy are NOT encrypted, only obfuscated, any federated server can read the DM’s you send. Keep that in mind when choosing content to talk about.
Someone could point out where I am wrong but essentially it is the same as a standard email in that there is a plain text copy stored in both the send and receive instance. Maybe it is easier to think of as just another comment where instead of @domain.xyz has read access, just the specified [email protected] has read access. The server admins could still see them if they wanted to, just like Yahoo, Google, etc can in plain text (which is how SPAM filters often, as of the email was actually encrypted they wouldnt know the content inside it to try to filter it out.
More end to end options are coming to the fediverse, (Matrix has been around, I saw something last week another was coming) but really most people don’t ever encrypt data they send to others, and don’t care usually.
See: Epsteins emails being accessible not without decrypting anything. There were people who supposedly found his password in the released files, and just logged into outlook or whatever with it. End to end encryption should have required them to have s/mime the handshake performed on that specific device to see the emails, so it would have all been garbledegook.
In the most practical cases, yes. But in theory, there is nothing about the protocol that says that message addressing implies message visibility, or even access control.
Also, be careful of taking your assumptions and treating them as universal truths. One day somebody could build an IRC-like system on ActivityPub and decides to treat a “ChatMessage” object as public objects which may or may not be addressed at a single participant. There would be no “bug” if the server picks up the object, relays to others, or even indexes it and makes it searchable.