Comment on Authorized Fetch Circumvented by Alt-Right Developers
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 year agoPrivacy and being free of (in-context) harassment aren’t the same thing. Your posts can all be public but your client can filter out any harassment, for example.
If the goal is privacy so that people who aren’t in the community don’t know that you’re in the community, and don’t know what the community is even talking about, I’m skeptical that it’s practical. Especially for a decentralized network, I think that the sacrifices needed to make this happen would make the social network unappealing to users. For example, you’d need to make it invite only and restrict who can invite, or turn off any kind of discovery so that you can’t find people who aren’t already in your circle. At that point you might as well just use a group chat.
ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
They’re related. Often, the ability to limit your audience is about making it non trivial for harassers to access your content rather than impossible.
That’s not the goal. The goal is to make a community that lets vulnerable folk communicate whilst keeping the harassment to a manageable level and making the sensitive content non trivial to access for random trolls and harassers.
It’s not about stopping dedicated individuals, because they can’t be stopped in this sort of environment for all the reasons you point out. It’s about minimising harassment from the random drive by bigots
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Hmmm I think I understand the intent. I’ll have to think on it some more.
My gut tells me that protecting people from drive-by bigotry is antithetical to content/community discovery. And what is a social network without the ability to find new communities to join or new content to see?
Perhaps something like reddit where they can raise the bar for commenting/posting until you’ve built up karma within the community? That’s not a privacy thing though.
What would this look like to you, and how does it relate to privacy? I’ve got my own biases that affect how I’m looking at the problem, so I’d be interested in getting another perspective.
ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
You’re thinking about this in an all or nothing way. A community in which everyone and everything they post is open to everyone isn’t safe.
A community in which no one can find members or content unless they’re already connected to that community stagnates and dies.
A community where some content and some people are public and where some content and some people are locked down is what we need, and though it’s imperfect, things like authorised fetch brings us closer to that, and that’s the niche that future security improvements on the Fediverse need to address.
No one is looking for perfect, at least not in this space.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I don’t think I’m looking for perfect, I’m looking for “good enough” and while authorized fetch is better than nothing, it’s nowhere near “good enough” to be calling anything “private”.
I’m thinking that maybe we need to reevaluate or reconsider what it looks like to protect people from harassment, in the context of social media. Compare that to how we’re currently using half-functional privacy tools to accomplish it.