ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the fediverse (including Mastodon – same caveats as the first two times, will be used interchangeably, deal with it) is not private. It is not even semi-private. It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely secure. Worse, anything you post on Mastodon is, once sent, for all intents and purposes completely irrevocable. To function, the network relies upon the good faith participation of thousands of independently owned and operated servers, but a bad actor simply has to behave not in good faith and there is absolutely no mechanism to stop them or to get around this. Worse, whatever legal protections are in place around personal data are either non-applicable or would be stunningly hard to enforce.
Wait until you find out about e-mail!
e-mail is protected by law.
Hilarious
Go troll somewhere else.
Cite and quote the specific laws that actually prevent anyone but the recipent from reading an email. If you can’t or won’t, you are the troll.
No. I leave you this burden. It’s too easy to type “Hilarious” and let the other party do the research.
I can’t find things that don’t exist.
You are the one saying it does, so the burden of proof is on you, troll.
Hilarious
edit: lol, you downvoted me like kids do.
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Maybe you didn’t read where it says even DIRECT MESSAGES aka private messages you send to people, and don’t choose to post in public, is easily and easily available.
This place is already an echo chamber. Jesus that’s bad. Everyone is on a new team and now we love this team and this team is never wrong and all criticisms are invalid. Even the really bad ones.
I don’t really care. I’m old enough to have never trusted the internet. But let’s not pretend this isn’t a huge fucking deal, and isn’t completely fucked just because Reddit bad and fediverse good
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Of course you can have encrypted group chats on Signal, if you’re not concerned about meta data. Or xmpp group chats with encryption if you want decentralization. You can keep your secret stuff secret and your public stuff public simply by using different apps.
Huh funny how a direct message is not a private message, almost like they’re even called completely different things.
Everything is public here, some stupid Euro anti-user ideals on privacy aren’t the be all and end all .
Things put in public are public. There is no privacy concern because there has never any privacy, nor will there ever be any privacy to be concerned about in a non-private platform such as this.
What do they call “private messages” on Twitter? What do you think DMs means on social media? Drivate Messages?
“Direct Message” and “Private Message” indeed mean different things. In practice, because both involve messaging one individual user, a good deal of people (including myself) still expect them to be functionally the same. Part of this functionality we expect is that there is an attempt to make these messages less visible and easy to access than the reply I just sent to you right now. This expectation is validated on Twitter:
Direct Messages are the private side of Twitter. You can use Direct Messages to have private conversations with people about Tweets and other content.
on Instagram:
Instagram DMs are an in-app messaging feature that allow you to share and privately exchange text, photos, Reels, and posts with one or more people.
a private message sent on a social media website, that only the person it is sent to can see
and by the fact that if you go on anyone’s profile, you can see post history, comment history, and boosts, but not a list of who they tried to send an individual message to or what those messages were. I believe that more technical people could retrieve such messages, that the messages are not totally secure, but to my layman eyes, I do still expect that there was at least an attempt to make these messages private.
