The free fediverses should focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety

scrubbles , 7 months ago

Privacy is a reverse idea on the Fediverse. I know it’s a hot take, but by design the Fediverse is never going to be private and people should stop assuming it is.

When you send out a comment/like/post/whatever, you are literally broadcasting a message to any other instance listening. It essentially just says

<span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  messageId: 42,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  message: "This is some message",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  action: "comment"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>

and if you want to delete that message it’s essentially

<span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  messageId: 42,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  action: "delete"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>

While Lemmy and Mastodon respect that, anyone can build any fediverse app and simply choose not to use it. Anyone can build a search engine and can choose to respect the delete or not. Any instance could defederate from them if they don’t like that, or they may not care. The point however is that ActivityPub is designed this way, and there really isn’t a better way.

If your comment has been sent out to other instances - well then it’s there already. You can’t delete it without some form of just asking politely that they delete it. They have it already, it could be stored in their DB, duplicated in other DBs, aggregated and sent to AI, searchable, whatever. They have it. There is no concept of “delete” on the fediverse. It’s asking nicely for them to delete it.

thenexusofprivacy OP , 7 months ago

As you say though it’s only shared to any other instance listening. The point of consent-based federation is that you get to choose which instances do and don’t get to listen. So if your comment hasn’t been sent out out to other instances, they don’t have it.

scrubbles , 7 months ago

Its documentation, for example, describes consent-based allow-list federation as “contrary to Mastodon’s mission.”

and I would agree with them. Consent based federation would fundamentally change the fediverse and create large tenants overnight. Small instances like mine would be at the mercy of large instances to be federated with them. It relies on people being kind and open, something we have already seen that some instance owners can be, others are not. I would even argue that that isn’t even federation anymore, it’s just slightly more open walled gardens

thenexusofprivacy OP , 7 months ago

Yeah, as I say in the article Mastodon makes other decisions that are also hostile to the idea of consent, so I also agree that they see it as contrary to their mission. In terms of large tenants, though, Mastodon changed the defaults to put sign people on mastodon.social, which as a result now has 27% of the active Mastodon users, so I don’t think that’s the basis of their objection.

And no, consent-based federation doesn’t rely on people being kind and open. To the contrary, it assumes that a lot of people aren’t kind, and so the default should be that they can’t hassle you without permission. It’s certainly true that large instances might choose not to consent to federate with smaller instances (just as they can choose to block smaller instances today), but I don’t see how you can say that’s not even federation anymore. Open source projects approve PRs and often limit direct checkins to team members but that doesn’t mean they’re not open source.

scrubbles , 7 months ago

I’m not saying that it’s not open source, I’m saying that I would argue it’s not federation anymore. Open source is irrelevant here, I’m not talking about the code.

I’m saying instances being “Closed to federation by default” and “whitelist only” is not true federation in my book.

I also am saying that instance owners are the ones who all of a sudden get a ton of power, specifically larger instance owners because they can decided arbitrarily not to federate with an instance they don’t deem worth federating with. The larger userbase aside, instance owners I believe can become power hungry and greedy and refuse to federate.

For example, even I, a teeny tiny instance owner, felt a pang of annoyance when someone created a duplicate community on their instance. It was fleeting and I told myself that that’s what the federation is, and that it’s okay, but not everyone will react that way. It’s inevitable that larger instances will say things like “Why should I federate with you, we have all of those communities over here”

rglullis , 7 months ago

So if your comment hasn’t been sent out out to other instances, they don’t have it.

What’s stopping malicious actors to create an account on the same instance as you and follow you (or your RSS feed) exclusively to pull your data?

Remember “information wants to be free”? That adage works both ways. If people want (or need) real privacy, they need to be equipped with tools that actually guarantee that their communication is only accessible to those intended to. The “ActivityPub” Fediverse is not it. They will be better off by using private Matrix (or XMPP rooms) with actual end-to-end encryption.

thenexusofprivacy OP , 7 months ago

Agreed that people who need strong privacy should use something like Signal (or maybe Matrix or XMPP). And also agreed that RSS feeds are a privacy hole on most of the fediverse; Hometown and GoToSocial both disable them by default, Mastodon should do the same.

Nothing prevents malicious actors who want to make enough of an effort from creating accounts on instances (or for that matter Matrix chat rooms). But that’s not feasible for broad data harvesting by Meta.

rglullis , 7 months ago

Your whole wordlview is hinging on two conflicting realities:

• social networking is an inherently public activity, and this is the way that the majority of people want it to be.
• the only way to be free from surveillance capitalism is by having private communications, and while this is something that affects everyone, only a minority of people seem to be actively opposed to it.

The “consent-based” social media does not work well for a small business owner who wants to promote their place to their local community, or the artisan that wants to put up a gallery with their work online. They want to be found.

If you tell them that they have to choose between (a) a social network that makes it easier for them to reach their communities or (b) a niche network that is only used by a handful of people who keeps putting barriers for any kind of contact; which one do you think they will choose?

What your recent articles are trying to do is (basically) try to shove the idea that the majority should change their behavior and completely reject a public internet. You are basically saying that the “social” networks should be "anti-"social in nature. This is, quite honestly, borderline totalitarian.

But that’s not feasible for broad data harvesting by Meta.

Why? You keep writing about how evil Meta is and their infinite amount of resources. If you really believe that, why do you think they would stop at the mere wall of “federation consent”?

RmDebArc_5 , 7 months ago

The thing most people get wrong is privacy friendly =! private. If you say something publicly (on the internet) you can assume it will stay for ever, if not directly then via some sort of archive. The privacy part of Lemmy/Mastodon is them not collecting data on what you look at to sell it. If you want something private then don’t use Social Media, because what you say publicly will stay public.