Anyone assuming anything on the fediverse is anything but public is wrong and hasn’t spent any time thinking about what the fediverse is. That may well be a problem that needs to be addressed, but the fundamental design of the protocol means, at the very least, server admins can see everything the users on their server do. This is a problem on any system that does not use end to end encryption.
Realistically there is only ‘public’ and ‘I didn’t press send’.
Give it a rest. A fork of Mastodon created a new abstraction for “private posts” and started sending to instances some posts that were marked in a new way as “private,” and now they’re trying to blame Pixelfed for not adopting their homemade standard for what posts their servers are sending out to everyone that they’re not supposed to show, and what ones they are supposed to show. And, Pixelfed fixed it once they became aware of the issue.
It’s fixed in 1.12.5. Why is this not titled “Mastodon instances claim to their users to offer ‘private’ posts but send them out exactly like normal posts, get surprised when software that hasn’t magically adopted their new standard is showing them to people”?
TBH, I doubt instance admins or Mastodon devs are surprised. It’s probably just a handful of people that think software changes should happen on their timetable.
The Fediverse has always had an “interoperability optional” design.
OP and the person who wrote the article seem surprised. The article author got very upset that it happened, as well as being upset that Dansup fixed the problem and pushed out a new version incorporating the fix within a few days, because that let everyone know it was a problem, which apparently he didn’t want to do. Which, of course, he tells a whole story (“I already dreaded what I felt was about to happen.” “clicked follow on my partner’s Mastodon account, and… I could see all of her private posts” “‘Oh no, not again’, I said”) about what a huge deal this whole thing is. But he doesn’t want users to know about it. And he totally dodges the issue I explained, even when going into a really abundant level of detail about how all the protocol works, about how this is a totally a Mastodon-side-created issue and one that their users should absolutely know about if they are being permitted to create “private” posts.
Bit of a clickbaity headline.
Pixelfed admins should update to v1.12.5 ASAP, but upgrading can be a major hurdle.
So it’s been patched, it’s just not necessarily simple to upgrade.
They shouldn’t be called private messages but direct messages. They’re not encrypted and can be read by your instance admin.
Post privacy on the fediverse is kind of a disaster, no one should ever rely on that ever. It will keep happening because it’s an easy mistake to make and it puts all the privacy controls onto the receiving instance’s hands, so as a user you can’t do anything about it. Anyone can try their own spin on Fediverse servers and make that mistake easily. If Lemmy could subscribe to users it probably would also be affected by this.
