Hi every lemmy. I've just stood up a couple new instances and I've been hanging out in the Admin chat over at https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy-support-general:discuss.online. Someone there asked if they could view subscriptions so I wrote and shared the sql query. (could I have done better on the joins with 2 joins to instance?)
And that's when I realized what an invasion of privacy that is. Maybe there's an easier way to do it but could we add optional support for user key pairs, so that if I associated a public key with my account, everything related to me in the db gets hashed with that key? Then I provide my private key at login?
I say optional because I know that's hard for a lot of folks. But maybe there's a way to make it easier with something like letsencrypt at sign up so it would be trivial for everyone to do it.. Or maybe there's a way to do it globally with a central key common to all instances, perhaps paired with instance specific keys?
I understand there's other aspects of user activity that would be best made private to so this could also work, say for votes or whatever else.
Then how is the server gonna know what content to push to your home instance?
Arguably that might not be needed for subscriptions specifically, the home instance could just know the overall list of subscriptions and use that. But then the subscription counters would be wrong, and lead to the same problem as votes.
But at least subscriptions are already strictly between the home instance and the remote instance, and never leaves the instance if the community is local.
what is the problem with votes btw? Someone else just mentioned those should be private too in the chat where I first raised this.
also, you could modify subscription counters so you had a count of subscribers from an instance without knowing who they were.
There, you've already found a reasonable way around it! ๐