Nice to see (some of) my taxes going to improving the Fediverse.
The Sovereign Tech Agency (previously Sovereign Tech Fund) is an organisation set up by the German government to fund critical open source projects. Mastodon receiving funds therefore means that the German government considers the Fediverse critical infrastructure.
Vaguely remember that some European government agencies dropped X and started public communication via the Fediverse.
This is great. I think one critique of the fediverse is the lack of privacy, so it’s a welcome development.
I think one critique of the fediverse is the lack of privacy
What? By whom? How?
Here’s one post about it. I’m not one for direct messaging on social media personally. And on centralized services it’s true that your direct messages can be seen by employees if they’re sufficiently motivated or by court order, hacks, that sort of thing. But on mastodon both the administrator of your instance and the admins of the instances of the people you’re messaging can see your direct messages. Since an instance can be set up quickly by just one person, there’s higher likelihood of access. That person may have no qualms about accessing private info, they may have insufficient resources for proper security, or to fight legal efforts to access information. A large company will in theory have more concern about reputational risk if it’s uncovered they’ve accessed private information than some individuals will. I know many people running instances take great pride and care in what they do, but that’s not always true.
Well, I mean, there is a lack of privacy. That’s kind of how the platform exists architecturally. I just don’t find that to be a problem, per se. It’s a social platform, which makes sense to me for everything on the protocol to be “open” to one degree or another. Not everything has to be securitymaxxed.
I agree with you. It’s a social platform. Most people might think it’s a nice feature, but I don’t think E2EE is an urge.
What lack of privacy are you referring to?
The fact that everything you write, upload or otherwise do (boost, upvote, downvote, etc.) is never private in any way or at any point, on any platform using the ActivityPub protocol, including Mastodon, along with every other platform or service that’s a part of the Fediverse, such as Lemmy or Piefed. Everything is out in the open, able to be seen by third parties.
This is by design, and it’s what enables federation to take place between a multitude of servers aka. instances. So it’s a trade off.
But properly implemented encryption could help to mitigate this to some degree. I think think most things won’t meaningfully benefit from being encrypted, since most things on these platforms are meant to be publicly visible in the first place - such as this conversation you and I are having now. But it would certainly be nice to be able to have direct messages that are also for sure private messages. And I can imagine a couple of other things where encryption could also be meaningfully applied, to some extent.
Oh cool
That’s pretty cool but they’re also going to be subjecting themselves to a very high level of scrutiny.
