Comment on Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances - fiona fokus
Irelephant@lemm.ee 4 weeks agoprivate posts are only sent to instances that either your followers or the list of people you want to see the post are on. If they all co-operate, you will be fine.
private posts are only sent to instances
Well, obviously they’re sent to some other ones, or else this wouldn’t be an issue.
This is a design flaw in the protocol. If your instance is going to send your private posts to other people, they’re not private. The authors need to fix your instance software, not demand that every other software in existence needs to “cooperate” and find out whether they’re “private” and not show them to the users if they are.
No, Imagine this
There is @bob@pixelfed.example their is their friend, @joe@mastodon.example. bob also follows @jane@gotosocial.example
If bob makes a private post (ie, followers only), only the instances of people he follows will recieve the post. The instance will see that its supposed to be private, and not show it to everyone.
This may, gotosocial.example, mastodon.example and pixelfed.example have the post, but don’t show it. misskey.example won’t have the post.
Then, if gotosocial.example (hypothetically) had a bug where it ignored posts visibility settings, those posts would be shown, since the post is sent to that server. If misskey.example had a similar bug, nothing would happen as the post wouldn’t have reached that server anyway.
Yeah, so there’s no real way to implement private posts on Mastodon.
I mean, it is fine if you want to implement sort of “best effort” semi-privacy and make it clear to everyone involved that that’s what it is, but for any reasonable definition of “private,” the requirement that it not get shown to people outside the list of people allowed to see it needs to be enforced better than this. There will always be server software that doesn’t “cooperate.” That’s just the nature of open distributed systems. If you’re making assurances to your users that their posts will be private, you need to be the one enforcing that, not everyone else on the network and the protocol needs to be set up with the ability for that to happen (which ActivityPub is not, which means it’s misleading that someone told users that they can have “private” posts via this hack.)
I wouldn’t consider it a hack, as the protocol was actually made with these posts in mind. Public posts weren’t the focus of activitypub.
I would consider it similar to email, should we abandon it (yes, but not because of this) just because a malicious email server started publishing all the emails it recieved? AP is just email but social media.
email works the same way. it’s impossible to implement private emails? if you cc your email to im.going.to@leak.it and it leaks, would it be fair to complain about the whole email system?
this is wrong, you’re assuming incorrectly. private posts get sent to only intended recipients. pixelfed allows other recipients on the same server to read that. it’s not your instance software, it’s pixelfed, please dont spread misinformation based on uninformed assumptions
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Gonna stop you right there
Irelephant@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Its like email, an email server can decide to expose everyone’s emails to the public, so don’t add that email to your mailing list or email chain.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
100% yes. But I think people also drastically overestimate the chain of trust within email. Never send anything over email that you don’t want going all over the place.
Irelephant@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
I really wish people (normies) could figure our pgp for email.