You are right.
Comment on [deleted]
sirxdaemon@lemmy.ca 3 weeks agoWait, what? It’s just the sender and receiver’s instances that can read the message; it’s not just any server right?
nutomic@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
rglullis@communick.news 3 weeks ago
The fact that a message is addressed to a single person does not mean that it’s only sent to that person. In theory, anyone following you will receive a notification about the message.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
This is wrong, Lemmy doesnt send private messages to followers.
rglullis@communick.news 3 weeks ago
I wasn’t talking about the specifics of Lemmy, but ActivityPub in general. You can not guarantee that just because a message has been addressed to a single actor that only that actor will see it.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
If any Activitypub platform sends messages to an actor which they arent addressed to, thats clearly a bug.
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I believe you’re right but don’t know enough about the real back end magic to confirm. What matters is that dm’s are not private and should not be considered private, both in transit (during sending) and at rest (copy sitting at each server)
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Someone could point out where I am wrong but essentially it is the same as a standard email in that there is a plain text copy stored in both the send and receive instance. Maybe it is easier to think of as just another comment where instead of @domain.xyz has read access, just the specified user@domain.xyz has read access. The server admins could still see them if they wanted to, just like Yahoo, Google, etc can in plain text (which is how SPAM filters often, as of the email was actually encrypted they wouldnt know the content inside it to try to filter it out.
More end to end options are coming to the fediverse, (Matrix has been around, I saw something last week another was coming) but really most people don’t ever encrypt data they send to others, and don’t care usually.
See: Epsteins emails being accessible not without decrypting anything. There were people who supposedly found his password in the released files, and just logged into outlook or whatever with it. End to end encryption should have required them to have s/mime the handshake performed on that specific device to see the emails, so it would have all been garbledegook.