I’ve just recently moved to Lemmy, and so far I’m enjoying it quite a bit. However, I’ve been thinking about the privacy issues whe DMing someone here.
Since this is a federated service, when you DM someone you have to trust both your server’s admin, as well as the recipient’s. Not that I particularly trusted reddit, but at least it was 1 corporation with (hopefully) some solid security procedures in place, and potential penalties for data breaches. Whereas in Lemmy, it might just be 2 random guys.
I’ve added an age key to my profile, in the hopes to make people aware of this issue. As well as giving them an option, if they wish to contact me privately.
I know, it’s not user friendly. But it’s the only way I could think of that wouldn’t rely on email + GPG. Does anyone know of a better solution?
EDIT: I also realise that not having signing capabilities might be an issue… So maybe reverting back to good ol’ GPG is a better option?
Thanks @owenfromcanada@lemmy.world, @russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net, @scarecrw@lemmy.one, @itsmect@monero.town, @BrikoX for mentioning the matrix integration. I was not aware of this feature.
I’d like to avoid creating a new matrix account for lemmy (as I already have one). Haven’t tried to have 2 accounts open on one device yet (don’t even know if it’s possible).
On Android, you can use Shelter (available on F-Droid) to install a second, independent instance of Element to the work profile. That way you can stay logged in with two accounts and receive notifications for both.
Oh that’s awesome! I hadn’t seen that before, and was going to mention SchildiChat which is a fork of Element (and they maintain a few variants of it as well, explicitly to “emulate” multi-account support in a way) - but that works even better, and would apply to more than just Element!
You need to assume that there is zero privacy on these websites for now and the foreseeable future. Besides the way that the activity pub protocol is designed to work, these sites are in beta and were slapped together.
It sucks but your best option is to just put telegram info in your bio afaik
E2E for federated messages would be great tho
isn’t XMPP what you’re asking for? I’m not a user, but I’m aware that these things exist, they just don’t catch on because it’s a nightmare to do federation and security all at once. Probably it will take some form of federated authentication ID, but then you have the problem of who manages that…
I’m no federation or csec expert but the big issue is storing the the user keys. Though maybe the keys could just be the user’s password. But then you have to trust that your instance isn’t stealing it.
You could have them checksummed by the lemmy/kbin/mastodon devs, but then now you have to trust them.
At some point you’d need a centralized authority, which is kinda against the whole point of the fediverse.
Honestly, so many big tech companies have demonstrated time and again that they’re run managed and operated by overgrown children, you should not trust them to not be reading your DMs or your emails, or watching your Ring videos, or anything else.
Honestly, just assume your smart fridge has someone in the other side watching you scratch your ass at this point.
Businesses are not to be trusted.
The difference is that you can take reddit/Twitter/Facebook to court over violating your privacy, you won’t have anywhere near that kind of luck with fredeverse hosts. If you notice, there isn’t really a TOS, those are filled with regulatory agreements from governments that says what they can and can’t do with your data. Here we’re hanging with our ass in the breeze. Best solution right now if you want to receive DMs is to use an encrypted app and block all DMs here.
You can sue the companies if you can prove specific violations. Knowing they can read your DMs and proving they have are very different things.
I’m not saying you should trust DMs here. I’m saying you shouldn’t trust them anywhere else, either. Not without demonstrable e2ee.
I know this isn’t an answer but unless I’m using an end-to-end encrypted service like Element or Signal to communicate, I’m assuming anything I write in a DM will become public at some time. Given that, if it is something some sensitive, I will make sure to use one of those instead of the in-house DM.
If you enter a matrix user name on your profile, Lemmy adds an extra button on your profile to “Send Secure Message”. Example: https://monero.town/u/shortwavesurfer
I don’t know if this behavior is default, or if you have to configure something for it, but I think it’s a nice way to bridge forum-like communities with chatrooms (matrix itself can be bridged with irc, discord, telegram).
I don’t know much about the available options, but aren’t we able to enter Matrix info in our bios? Or maybe that’s instance-specific?
I know nothing about Matrix though, other than that it’s an E2E thing.
There’s an option/field in Lemmy’s settings to put in a Matrix User ID, although I’ve had mine there and have no clue where it shows up. If I go to my profile, I can’t see it, unless I’m really overlooking it haha.
It probably doesn’t show when viewing your own profile, but yours shows two links:
Send Messagewhich links to sending a private message through lemmySend Secure Messagewhich links to sending a message through matrix
Element’s an interesting one because it’s on the matrix protocol, which is already federated. You could, in theory, simply graft matrix onto any given activitypub instance and run all chat through that, though you’d need to get all the other activitypub instances to agree to do it the same way.
