Micah LeeYou know instance admins can read your direct messages in the fediverse? Twitter and Facebook also can - and sometimes do - read your private messages, and they have infrastructure to comply with law enforcement requests. I'd love to see some end-to-end encryption built into Mastodon clients.
(moved) boots🌸🌿@micahflee Honestly, Mastodon gives you a huge honkin warning about trust and everything else says nothing.
Andrew Roach ✅@micahflee This is part of Gmail's Business Model. They make money from reading your emails.
Joey@micahflee is too soon, I think it will happens
ᐱᕐᓇᑐ@micahflee The Intercept should set up it's own instance, with privacy in mind
Jeffrey Vagle@micahflee Hear, hear.
Your brain.. on bots.@micahflee e2ee would be great.
Netkitteh@micahflee PGP would be easy but terrible, it would be cool to implement OMEMO
auerbach@micahflee Another reason why the "Pick a server that you trust!" blurb on Mastodon's front page makes me skittish.
For me at least, there aren't any!
74810b012346c9a6_old@auerbach @micahflee You could run your own instance. But all in all Mastodon doesn't seem to be well-suited for private communication, that's not the niche it fills. There are plenty of other projects for that.
MMN-o ✅⃠@auerbach All you should have to trust the instance with is your identity. Given federation, you will have no control over your data. Post only things that are public, discuss only things that are socially constructive and move your private business to either a medium designed for privacy (XMPP) or make sure to use pseudonyms on alternate accounts to go about your less public business. Those are my two-fiddy.
Kat@micahflee Yes yes yes.
Simon Richter@micahflee At least in FidoNet, people understood that.
@micahflee How would you envision it happening? An embedded XMPP client + OTR?
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takeshix@micahflee Probably https://webpg.org/ could be a good start.
maloki
Falkreon 🏳️🌈@micahflee I feel like PGP was made to solve exactly this kind of problem. Would we even need to change anything, except maybe relaxing the 500-character limit?
Constance Variable@micahflee just use matrix / xmpp.
Rysiekúr (old account)@lambadalambda @micahflee the solution here is not to use a different tool, but to fix the tool we're using. There is no reason why #Mastodon couldn't support #e2e #encryption in private messages.
@rysiek @micahflee SUre, but why? There are already several mature open source federated e2e encrypted chat systems available. Both xmpp and matrix could even be easily integrated into the existing user@instance id scheme. They have mobile clients, web clients, desktop clients...
It's neat to encrypt a tweet and send it to someone, but it just seems like the wrong tool for the job.
It's neat to encrypt a tweet and send it to someone, but it just seems like the wrong tool for the job.
@lambadalambda @micahflee but that's the tool people are using. I use XMPP+OTR, e-mail+PGP, Signal, etc., but if somebody is not as tech-savvy but is already here, I don't see why they should not have the option of encrypting private messages.
Or, put a bit differently: https://mastodon.social/media/N9MHhHNBYckrKdO8bPc
@lambadalambda @micahflee Yes, that is a concern. Still better than nothing though.
Also, you're completely ignoring apps. If #Mastodon has official and standardized support for #e2e #encryption, apps can implement it, closing the JS loophole.
pettter ✅@rysiek @lambadalambda @micahflee I think adding an integrated XMPP+OMEMO server and client in Mastodon is a good idea. I think creating something homebrew is a bad idea.
BjarniBjarniBjarni 🙊 🇮🇸 🍏@pettter @rysiek @micahflee FWIW, I agree with @lambadalambda - it can be argued that private messages are simply a misfeature in OStatus since they cannot be truly private without extra (non-standard) hacks.
Keeping things simple is valuable; using the right tool for the job (some other protocol for private messages) is good engineering.
Lieselotte ❤️🔥❤️@HerraBRE @lambadalambda @micahflee @rysiek @pettter "is good engineering" is not the same as "is a good user experience" then, no?
@lieselotte @pettter @rysiek @micahflee @lambadalambda Well, I'd venture that poor engineering usually leads to a poor user experience sooner or later. The fundamental user expectation is "software that works".
Mastodon and GNU Social and others could all agree to integrate XMPP (or even SMTP) for direct messages. It doesn't need to be in the OStatus protocol.
@lambadalambda It's still up to the admin to set up the xmpp server (with bosh!), though, so it's not very widespread :-/
[MOVED] Christopher Webber@HerraBRE @micahflee @rysiek @pettter Note that having private messages work cleanly (and no different than public posts) is one of the things ActivityPub was designed for. The design is much closer to email delivery... outbox -> inbox, w/ to, cc, bcc addressing.
@cwebber @micahflee @rysiek @pettter I think some of us feel that creating new "private messaging" channels that lack e2e crypto is really not something we should be doing anymore.
@HerraBRE @cwebber @micahflee @pettter OTOH some of us feel we should also not build any more centralized tools, and yet #Signal... ;)
@lambadalambda @micahflee @rysiek Not completely. Riseup rolled out a system a few weeks ago that encrypts all emails with your login passwords. So if they have to hand out data, it will be encrypted data. https://0xacab.org/riseuplabs/trees
Philosophically: The same thing. Granted.
Practically: Huge difference if you ask me.
Mex 😎@micahflee yep, I was wondering how to implement this (at least, log what is done "by hand" on the database). Any ideas?
Tiffany White@micahflee end to end encryption is essential for messaging cross-instance too, tbh
vruz [DEAD ACCOUNT]@micahflee I'd love to see many thngs and the open source way iz you contribute the things you want to see in the world. Mature, safe, and reliable systems don't happen overnght and this isn't a corporatin with unlimited budget.
programizer