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minnix
There aren't serious technical obstacles but it may be a poor idea if it turns into a hive of abuse. I got into a discussion about implementing forum software a while back and I said I wanted it to have encrypted DM's, and several operators jumped in and said it would probably attract more trouble than it was worth. People wanting direct private comms can always use encrypted email. On Reddit whenever I wanted to discuss anything the least bit private, I generally asked to exchange email addresses with the person or similar, and went from there in some cases to a self hosted encrypted chat.
Anyway this feature should be weighed somewhat carefully. Are you going to do the thing with warrant canaries? Any attempt at all to conceal metadata? Etc.
Yeah i am not a fan of services trying to cover all needs that people might ask for. This is a public forum system, if you start adding things like this to it, the protocol will become bloated real fast.
Also idk how they want to implement this, but proper multi client e2ee is complicated as fuck. Are they going to store keys in the browser? How will it work with non official clients? How do keys get transferred between clients?
This is a hugely time intensive project and if you fuck it up, people will be more mad than if you just didnt do it.
It's less a technical problem than one of attracting bad actors, then law enforcement chasing the bad actors, warrants, subpoenas, seizures, that whole bit. Think of running a Tor exit oode. If that's what you want to do and you go into it wth your eyes open, then fine, but sleepwalking into it seems like something to avoid.
That really does sound like a bag of hurt.
But it also sounds like a fuller alternative to what the big guys offer. And in the long run it would make it a well rounded space and protocol.
It’s too bad that it sounds like it both isn’t straightforward to implement properly, and attracts heat.
I wish them luck. Privacy and security would be great. People do use these spaces as direct messaging platforms. Even if it’s not the best all around idea. As social spaces evolve, the way people message evolves too. Making it secure earlier in that cycle is good.
Lemmy (at least lemmy.world) has relatively little appetite for edgy content even compared to reddit. Look at the communities and instances that have been banned already.
It may be worthwhile to offer secure deletion of stored DM's after some interval, even if they are stored in the clear. I posted some code for that a long time ago. Maybe I can dust it off of rewrite it.
I just feel like the obvious choice is to build a system to seamlessly connect from activitypub to an existing secure messaging platform. Reinventing the wheel like this is just a waste of resources imo.
On Lemmy you can't exchange email addresses though... else you'd be exposing the addresses publicly and that's also rife for spam
Of course you can PM your email address to someone. It's not encrypted but it's not exactly public in the sense that spammers can see it.
I was under the impression it wasn't even truly private, nevermind encrypted. Not actually sure how it works though
It's somewhat private. Like when you enter your email address to make a Lemmy account, the address is stored on the server. The admins can see it and it could potentially escape in a server breach, but it is not intentionally made public. So most of us don't worry. The interest in encrypting pm's is that they can potentially be more sensitive than email addresses.
So the worry is that people will be abusive in private messages and mods will have no chance to moderate that talk?
Yes basically. And also use the pm system for literal crime, bringing heat on the admins.
Make it so users can opt out and not be sent messages at all. I have a feeling spam thats harder to moderate is coming.
If it's with asymmetric encryption, wouldn't it be possible for the report button to generate a key based on their private key which can only be used to decrypt the given message?
Sounds like you know more about encryption than I do, I would hope they can do that but I still think a full off switch for users would be wise though.
Yeah, end to end encryption means its not possible for someone to intercept the message between person A and person B. Nothing stops person B then forwarding the message to person C to report it.
Yeah as long as theres an (practically) unfalsifiable way to forward the message that sounds very useful, which sounds like there is based on the response to my first comment.
Typically end to end encryption includes digital signing of the message so you can verify who the sender was.
Or just send them the message in plain text, since you're showing it to somebody else anyway.
But I think the issue is there's no way for your instance to stop you getting the spam as they've no idea what it is until you unlock it.
I guess the best they could do is block messages from a certain user/instance but since you can generate as many accounts as you want, it's hard to tell how effective that could be.
If you send them the message in plain text they have no way of verifying you aren't just making it up to get someone you don't like banned. Keeping it encrypted means they know the sender wrote it.
Only if the sender signed it. I presume the system does that anyway so you can be sure who sent something.
It could be sent plaintext as long as the senders signature was intact.
That's a good idea. Send message > Message signed and sent > Receiver opens message, signature bits are hidden, but clicking report sends plaintext with signature included. Only ends up in report queue if signature is valid.
Yeah, it would be nice to not end up like Reddit, where every day brought a new crypto scam my way.
finally. cant wait to receive dozens of P U S S Y I N B I O messages
Gotta love protected sex
Here's to hopping lemmy implements it cause frankly the using matrix idea isn't to my liking . Reasons : I don't wanna connect another id to an internet forum where any troll can get it, Its easier and better and would solve a major security issue lemmy has, i think matrix is a hot mess for now .
That seems good.
The real question is whether Evan & Tom will take sup's way of working into account when researching this, or go in a completely different direction.
Finally I can accept pictures of all my e friends dinguses
Hallelujah
I think they should use matrix
Agreed. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I really hope this would end up as just security extension, to additionally encrypt something because we can. And not another reinventing of the chat network.
Keeping messages is a recipe for backdoors. There's a reason signal does not store DMs long term.
"Encrypted DMs"
isn't that just a longer way of saying "PM"?
PMs today aren't really private as in E2EE. They're private as in only you, the receiver and the "trust me bro" company can see them. In special data breach cases, the attacker as well.
please just offer good matrix integration and be done with it