Comment on Authorized Fetch Circumvented by Alt-Right Developers
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
I’m kind of tired of social networks offering even the pretense of privacy. Just loudly proclaim that everything is public but clients can filter out shit you don’t wanna see.
ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
That doesn’t work for vulnerable minorities. Manually filtering each shitty person after you step in their shit gets old. Coupled with the fact that not shutting down shitty people just means more shitty people are likely to turn up.
It’s not sustainable
Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 10 months ago
I think in this context it’s meant on a technical level: as far as the fediverse is concerned, there’s not a whole lot instances can do. Anyone can just spin up an instance and bypass blocks unless it works on an allowlist basis, which is kind of incompatible with the fediverse if we really want to achieve a reasonable amount of decentralization.
I agree that we shouldn’t pretend it’s safe for minorities: it’s not. If you’re a minority joining Mastodon or Lemmy or Mbin, you need to be aware that blocking people and instances has limitations. You can’t make your profile entirely private like one would do on Twitter or any of Meta’s products. It’s all public.
You can hide the bad people from the users but you can’t really hide the users from the bad people. You can’t even stop people from replying to you on another instance. You can refuse to accept the message on the user’s instance, but the other instance can still add comments that don’t federate out. Which is kind of worse because it can lead to side discussions you have no way of seeing or participate in to defend yourself and they can be saying a lot of awful things.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
It’s the unfortunate reality. Social networks simply cannot in offer privacy. If they were upfront about it, then people could make rational decisions about what they share.
But instead they (including Mastodon) pretend like they can offer privacy, when they in fact cannot, resulting in people sharing things that they would not otherwise share.
ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
It’s not as black and white as you make it. The options aren’t “perfect security” and “no security”.
The option that most people that experience regular harassment want is “enough security to minimise the shit we have to deal with to a level that is manageable even if it’s imperfect”
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
While you’re theoretically right, we’ve seen in practice that nobody really offers even the imperfect privacy you describe, and on decentralized systems it only becomes harder to solve.
A Facebook style centralized network where you explicitly grant access to every single person who can see your content - is as close as we can get. But nobody is trying to make that kind of social network anymore, because there isn’t much demand for it.
If you want a soapbox (Twitter/mastodon/bluesky, Reddit/Lemmy/kbin, Instagram/pixelfed, YouTube/toktok/peertube) then privacy is going to be a dream, especially if decentralized.
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 10 months ago
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
It’s about the nature of the network. If it’s just a little bubble where you only see and interact with your friends, it’s probably doable. But nobody seems to want that anymore.
People want soapboxes like Twitter or Reddit or tiktok or YouTube. Privacy there is a lot more complicated and dubious.
In this case specifically, I think that the bad servers are spoofing as good servers. Which seems solvable (else cryptography signing things wouldn’t work), but still.
sugarfree@lemmy.world 10 months ago
A private forum may be useful in that case.
ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
Why even bother with that comment?