What do we need to change about how we operate, now that the political environment is darkening?

The overall goals would be to safeguard user identities, ensure communication privacy, and protect against censorship and state surveillance.

User Anonymity and Privacy

  • End-to-end encryption: Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data
  • 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?
  • Tor and VPN Integration: Ensure compatibility with privacy tools like Tor, and provide guidance on using VPNs.

Data Storage

  • Remove or minimize data collection, including IP addresses, geolocation, and device information. No web server logs.
  • Ephemeral content: auto-deleting posts, messages, etc after a set period.
  • Instance chooser that flags which instances are in unsafe countries.
  • Defederate from instances in unsafe countries?

Communities

  • Private communities - currently all are public
  • Communities where every post is encrypted
  • Approval process to join some communities
  • Better opsec around instance owners, admins and moderators

What else?

  • burgersc12@mander.xyzEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    Nope, wasn’t aware. Still seems like ActivityPub is the wrong way to go if your priorities include encryption and anonymity.

    • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      ActivityPub is absolutely not suited for private communication. I guess you could in theory transfer encrypted content over AP as well, but it’s not what it is designed for and it generally makes little sense for content in a public forum like this. I don’t think anyone thinks otherwise.

      This is not what is proposed though. For E2EE, Rimu suggests the following:

      Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data

      So to keep user data encrypted on the server, as well as looking into finding a way to encrypt private messages. I think it’s hard to argue this wouldn’t be at least a minor change for the better, giving instance administrators less insight into the private data of the users (and thereby also making them less vulnerable to law enforcement).

      Of course this wouldn’t make PieFed or Lemmy or whatever a good replacement for Signal. It is not supposed to be. It’s a public forum. But it can still do its best to protect the identity of the users in this public forum, even with the inherent limitations of the format.