Fediverse

No. Federation is the wrong decentralization model for anyone worried about malicious state actors. Just like email encryption, it doesn't matter how secure you/your server is, you still need to rely on the weakest link on the chain and that is simply unacceptable.

If you want to have secure social media, we need to move away from Federation and we will have to build a fully distributed network where data only lives at the edge nodes and participants can only communicate after exchanging their own personal keys.

Anything else is just infosec cosplaying.

Ugh, the comments here...

I think these are some good ideas, but e2ee in a browser that depends on server supplied javascript will never be really safe.

I think you would be better off making a nice XMPP integration so that people can use existing native apps with good e2ee for their private messages.

Otherwise the ideas are sensible and worth a shot, looking forward to what you come up with in Piefed 😊

OUR NEW AUTHORITARIAN OVERLORDS ARE PERFECT IN EVERY WAY

So something I want to point out: plain text encryption exists. Cyphers and the like. You could have your instance use all the standard stuff but with a really hard cypher, and it would work everywhere. Then you just need a front end to read it… but then the cops could read it… oh public encryption makes no sense.

• A lock or panick button that immediately wipes everything and makes the logs unusable

• Easy support for canaries and transparency from the admins, like on Peertube where you're incentivised to write something about your newly installed instance, where it's located etc

• Maybe take inspiration from European GDPR, assess which information can be used for what, make it transparent to the user what gets stored where and why... Somewhat assisted by the software ao not every admin has to figure that out on their own.

• secure DMs

Btw, nice atmosphere here /s I don't think the general Lemmy audience is very receptive to change. I mean sure, this contradicts with a few fundamentals within how this place is designed. But I think we should make an effort. If I remember correctly, social media played an important role in recent (peaceful) protests and opposition. Like the Arab Spring. And nowadays the big social media platforms are bootlickers and likely to cooperate with the problematic administration. So it's down to the Fediverse if we want to address a general audience. I don't think a complex peer-to-peer solution, maybe backed by onion routing and elaborate encrytion is going to be appealing to the masses. It'd be the correct tool for proper confident conversation. But likely not the tool that connects the millions of regular people.

And I'd aegue "defederate from instances in unsafe countries" doesn't work. We have to treat every one as unsafe and not federate private information in the first place. All other optiins are just error-prone and likely easy to circumvent.

Wait I thought we use disposable emails. Is there some rule against it oops. And which instance wants a phone number?

The way I see it there are 5 ingredients: VPN, disposable email, doxx aware usage, no phone numbers, random browser fingerprint.

Then from the Lemmy side that’s pretty private. all depends on your vpn and email providers. Choose no logs services from the countries that don’t have relations with the country you are in.

I imagine some Lemmy instances also could have logging off in the countries where it isn’t necessary by law to store such things.

I guess there are those kinda timing attacks that check ISP logs against some user web activity but are they really realiable? In which case though you could have a mode that would make a comment/post after a random delay.

I know you're a Piefed developer, so you probably know what's possible and what's not better than me. But honestly, the encryption part makes me think you probably want a new protocol designed with that in mind from the start. In my opinion, it's too destructive for compatibility with other ActivityPub software and instances running older versions of them especially.

Combating spam despite the simplified account creation will probably require the implementation of something like Reddit's karma system. Which isn't a very popular idea I think.

Regarding the ephemeral content.... please don't. It might sound cool on paper, but it just adds FOMO. We shouldn't promote doomscrolling and brainrot with the addition of features which require you to quickly scroll through shit to not miss out on posts that disappear after a timer has passed.

You probably want something like Aether instead of the fediverse: https://getaether.net/

It's peer to peer, encrypted, anonymous, ephemeral and all that.

The fediverse is plainly just not appropriate for this. The ActivityPub makes too many assumptions that the data is fully public.

End-to-end encryption: Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data

That could work probably, it's a lot of work and will break interoperability but could be done. You'd still have to vet your users very well though, which might contradict the next point. It takes one user to leak everything.

Anonymous accounts: Allow users to create accounts without requiring personally identifiable information (PII), such as email or phone numbers. How can we balance this with the need to combat spam?

There's a fair amount of instances already that will let you sign up with a disposable email

Tor and VPN Integration: Ensure compatibility with privacy tools like Tor, and provide guidance on using VPNs.

A fair chunk of instances already allow VPN/Tor traffic. The bigger ones don't because of spam and CSAM and all that crap, but even Reddit is fully functional over a VPN.

Remove or minimize data collection, including IP addresses, geolocation, and device information. No web server logs.

That'd be very hard to enforce, and the instance owners have to do some collection for the sake of being able to handle lawsuits and pass the blame. But you can protect yourself using a VPN or Tor.

Ephemeral content: auto-deleting posts, messages, etc after a set period.

As an admin, I can literally just restore last month's backup and undelete everything that got deleted. If someone's seen it, you must assume it can at minimum have been screenshot.

Instance chooser that flags which instances are in unsafe countries.

Anyone can get a VPS in just about any country, so you'd have to personally verify the owner which is PII and probably one of the most vulnerable part of the group. You take down the owner you take down the whole thing.

Once again however users have plenty of choices already for that, if you trust your instance's admins.

Defederate from instances in unsafe countries?

Same as previous point. Plus, one can still use the API to fetch the content anyway.

Better opsec around instance owners, admins and moderators

Also pretty hard to enforce.

Lemmy is a public forum, if you want to communicate privately exchange matrix handles and communicate there.

Lemmy is simply not the place for that sort of communication.

My recommendation would be SimpleX.

Right, like the other person says, Lemmy fundamentally doesn't work like that. IDK what Piefed is. Ironically, in a sense, 4chan was ahead of us by decades.

Lol. Just make a new software at this point, because what you describe is not Lemmy and never will be.

looks left

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looks right

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Hellooooo? Fascists? Are you on Lemmy?

looks around

Yeah, I don't think I'm on the right part of Lemmy where fascists are engaging. Not that I'm complaining. It just feels like you're living in an igloo complaining that a cactus might grow.

I think encryption at rest for account data should be a thing, but there are better ways to communicate and organize if that's what you're trying to do

I think the biggest thing would just be making sure that it's not easy for the government to get user data. So making signups without personally identifiable info would potentially be worthwhile, so that info can't just be subpoenaed to identify users irl

Imagine pasting this LLM bullshit unabashedly as if it's something people should sagely nod through recognizing how necessary it is to turn this poor man's reddit into NSA internal messaging forum. "Better opsec around instance owners", did you even read that before pasting? Who are you writing that for, instance owners' handlers?