61
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
61 points (73.3% liked)
Fediverse
28746 readers
420 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
If something is on a public unencrypted website, it isn't private.
Unfortunately certain people have chosen to mislead users about this.
You may as well post your ass on a billboard then complain that people look at it.
Fediverse software has followers-only posts, direct messages, local-only posts … Mobilizon and Streams even have private groups.
None of that is private. It's all readable by anyone with an admin account.
As a general rule. If it's not end to end encrypted, assume it's public.
That's missing the point though: if something isn't completely private then it has the chance of going public. Too many services pretend to be more private than they really are by using terms like "private message" when all they're really offering is a relatively small barrier to seeing your data, especially if anyone can set up their own instance.
"Readable by anybody with an admin account" is not the same as public. And as a bunch of people involved in January 6 found out, end-to-end-encrypting something doesn't keep mean it won't get revealed. So the general rule is assume anything you say online could be made public; use Signal (or some other encrypted messaging that you trust) and limit distribution to a small number of trusted people to reduce the chances of that happening -- but don't count on it!