https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/email-isnt-private/20662

Humans are great. We’re also shit about some things. We’re working on it. It remains to be seen whether we’ll get our stuff together before we wreck the planet thoroughly enough that it can’t support us in this current paradise mode, but it’s not because we are incapable. Our failures are failures of spirit, self-government and self-control, and good values, not failures of “fitness” or that this layout hasn’t been successful at getting us this far.

“Now that you put it that way, I feel silly for not seeing it earlier. That’s clearly exactly how it is.”

I think the “occupiers” are “the West” in this equation. The narrative being that South Korea are victims of the US and EU, and if only they were lucky like North Korea to be free of those violent forcible influences, they’d be much better off, like North Korea is.

It is fascinating to me how persistent Lemmy.ml and friends are about framing the instances they find problematic as being some kind of unusual outliers, instead of it being literally every single one outside of the Hexbear / .ml / Lemmygrad triad.

Yeah. One of the very few design feature of AP that I like is that actors have their very own keys, which means that in theory you could have the keys stay in the browser unlocked by a passphrase or something, and make it so no one could forge a message by a user except that user.

It would be pretty easy to extend that, so that Lemmy DMs get encrypted with the key of the actor meant to receive them, private posts get multi-encrypted with the public keys of any approved followers, et cetera. But yeah it seems like the amount of attention this stuff gets is very minimal.

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.

Yes, and people implemented PGP for encrypted email, and also made SMTP over TLS the standard, so that they wouldn’t have to demand that every router and every SMTP server everywhere on the internet agree not to republish or store secret information that was passing through it, because it started to become understood that email was in no way private.

A proper standard for private posts would be similar. You could have all private posts be encrypted with a rotating key, for example, and have them decrypted by anyone who had the key, on the client side, and stored and transmitted in encrypted form. Being approved to follow the private posts would involve your user being given a copy of the key through some kind of private key exchange. It sounds complex (and it would be, a little), and it would involve moving to the client some of the key management that currently happens on the instance server (and thus undoes some of the actually good design of ActivityPub, by just putting the instance software back in the position of keeping every actor’s keys for them and doing all the crypto work on behalf of the users). Anyway, it would be work and involve some redesign. I’m not saying that’s what they should have done. I’m saying that’s what having private posts as a feature would mean. Anything else is non-private posts that are pretending to be private posts.

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.)

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.

Lmao

You are completely right. I spoke too soon.

Dude, what the fuck am I doing lending my attention to a platform which features a core developer this stupid?

Indeed and definitely, I liked your reference

Good stuff, “my friend says we’re like the dinosaurs” would also have been slick

Edit: Yes and

It’s definitely clear to me that there is some kind of organized pro-Russian and anti-Democrat shilling going on on Lemmy. How much, it’s more or less impossible to know.

I was a little bit surprised that Lemmy is worth infiltrating, yes. I think it’s possible that any social media with a presence in the thousands of people is worth the effort. It’s not that strange. Any post on Facebook will have a limited reach, any post on Lemmy will have a limited reach, they’re really not all that tremendously different. I’ve heard other random rumors of people speculating about particular details of how and why, but I think there is more or less no way to know. All I’ve really seen directly is occasional slip-ups of someone pretending to be American when they clearly are not, as well as the obvious pattern of super vocal accounts which push more or less nothing but one particular geopolitically-useful ideology.

From time to time I try to trap them in some sort of bot detection attempt, and it always fails. 🙂

And yes, I have no idea what the connection is between humanspiral and the slrpnk mods, or even if there is one. I just observed that one really weird event and it always sort of stuck in my mind. Also, some of the slrpnk mods were definitely very vigorous leading up to the election in posting “don’t vote for Democrats” stuff and deleting anyone who tried to disagree with it.

I had a conversation with a “Democrats betrayed us on Gaza” account, during which time it started to seem pretty likely to me they they couldn’t speak Arabic but were pretending that they could. That was pretty interesting. Instead of being able to speak on the Arabic details we were talking about, they started dissembling into a pattern of (1) hostility (2) accusing me of being the person in the wrong because I am bad (3) randomly changing the subject, making nonsensical statements, and insisting that they were right. Sort of like these examples:

Link to thebrainbin.org that Lemmy is too simple-minded to be able to expand

https://ponder.cat/post/2054411/2342084

If you start looking closely, it’s only a small number of accounts that tend to “argue” in that very particular way, and they almost all have the same particular political views. I wonder why.

Haha fair enough, in that case you will find exactly what you’re looking for.

I mean in fairness, voting for this post is currently sitting at negative 84, with most of the top comments yelling at OP for being stupid.

There’s a certain amount of .ml stupidness in the comments, too, but it’s in the minority.

Attention! Turn back. Going into these comments can bring you nothing of happiness. You can just look up the “tumblr reading comprehension” meme instead of needing to see the gory details of it in action.

The world is a wonderful place, and far too wide to need to conform to your pet theory.

They love Stepan Bandera. They can’t stop talking about this dude.

I suspect that becoming wildly cursing aggressive against any “enemy” point of view fulfills some important functions for maintaining the groupthink.

• It demotivates anyone from participating in lemmy.ml if they have an enemy view, obviously
• It creates a “conflict” that will then motivate people to step in and shut down the conversation, preventing there from being some kind of reasoned discussion on the topic that might have poked a hole in the narrative. This isn’t all that vital on lemmy.ml itself, since the mods can simply censor opposing views, but outside of lemmy.ml it becomes more important. A lot of communities will ban “divisive” topics, because of this tactic working, thus eliminating places where discussion could take place that could puncture the narrative.
• Most crucially, it works to insulate the lemmy.ml user from being able to have conversations in which they might realize holes in the narrative. If they react to certain messages by saying, “What are you talking about? There is no genocide in Xinjiang.” then a very dangerous type of conversation might ensure. If they react with, “Yeah LIBBBITY LIB LIB how much does the State Dept pay you you fucking bootlicker I GUESS YOU LOVE NAZIS fucking disgusting” then they’re a lot safer from someone having a reasoned response. Actually, the type of response they’ll get will just reinforce their overall impression that the outside world is hostile and hates their point of view. I’ve seen lemmy.ml users who seem to be genuinely confused about why people are “attacking” them when they came in with all guns blazing. In their accustomed environment, that kind of gleeful insulting hostility is rewarded and welcomed, and so when they get hostile pushback, it feels weird and like people are against them.

I think that last point is a hugely important and underappreciated feature. It’s also at work in MAGA propaganda. It’s also part of why Mormons are required to go into the outside world but interact with it within a format that will guarantee people won’t be receptive to them. Nobody on the planet is going to develop a more favorable view of the Mormons because some of them surprised them at the door of their home and talked to them about how important it is to be Mormon. The purpose of the setup is to impact the Mormons in the equation. So, also, it is with how lemmy.ml users learn to interact with non-tankies.