• 0 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
rss






  • I suppose it’s a call to arms - the intended audience is those who are familiar with all those acronyms. It’s meant to ignite a fire in the belly to spur individual action against the proposed Chat Control legislation.

    I know what you mean though. The reality of “resisting” is actually kinda messy. Using all the mentioned tooling is exhausting. Much like I don’t think that consumer recycling is going to save humanity, I don’t think that if everyone “made the little effort required to secure their data and their communications” it would end crazy proposals like Chat Control. TLS is so common now (in HTTPS) and WhatsApp (implementing e2ee) is incredibly popular. Yet here we are.

    The article briefly mentions open-source software. To me this is where I see more private & secure by design stuff like you mention. I’m happy that things like Lemmy exist making countermeasures like 3rd party cookie blocking sand URL cleansing irrelevant.










  • I agree. ActivityPub messages are not necessarily public information; implementations like Mastodon and Lemmy just assume it - and there’s nothing stopping the services relaying the messages elsewhere afterwards.

    Actually in my fiddling with ActivityPub I’ve made some posts and comments to a Lemmy instance which were not relayed to other instances, even though they would have been if I made them using Lemmy. So there’s definitely opportunity for systems to implement features inbetween “totally public” and “single recipient”.



  • My understanding is that the anonymous profile thing won’t really work. That’s as far as ActivityPub is concerned - one of the protocols behind Lemmy, Mastodon et al.

    Every person/bot/whatever which comments, posts, upvotes; any social “activity” must have an independently verifiable public identity (via WebFinger). Here are some example identities:

    When some “activity” is performed by that identity, a message is delivered to many (many!) servers. They could be running anything but we commonly see Mastodon, Lemmy, Meta’s Threads (soon?).

    Each server can really do whatever it wants with that message. For example:

    1. I posted this photo from a Mastodon instance (via @otl@hachyderm.io)
    2. The Mastodon server also delivered a message to !motorcycles@lemmy.world.
    3. The Lemmy server at lemmy.world stored it in a big database so subscribers can read it.
    4. @ganksy@lemmy.world replied “Wild and chilling landscape”.
    5. Lemmy stored the reply and also delivered the reply to @otl@hachyderm.io.
    6. Mastodon stored the reply in its own big database so I can read it.

    Coming back to the OP:

    That was a long winded way of saying we should have (optionally) private profiles in lemmy.

    Here is some service’s idea of what @otl@hachyderm.io is:

    There’s no way to make a profile private because there isn’t really a profile to begin with. What we really have is just the activity received from @otl@hachyderm.io. The whole thing feels a lot more like email than popular social networking sites when you get down to the nuts and bolts.

    Old-school mailing lists archives also offer a way to search for posts by author. e.g. Richard Miller


  • I never expected that they’d put generative AI in WhatsApp, like, why???

    it doesn’t really add anything substantial to what the chat app is already good for: chatting with our fellow humans.

    A lot of this is for WhatsApp Business. Meta are monetising WhatsApp. The idea is that businesses will use WhatsApp Business and the shitty AI features to (direct from their website): “Engage audiences, accelerate sales and drive better customer support outcomes on the platform with more than 2 billion users around the world.”

    What a cringe :(