You 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.
@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.
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 @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.
@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 :-/
@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 @pettter interesting!
@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.
