What do we need to change about how we operate, now that the political environment is darkening?

The overall goals would be to safeguard user identities, ensure communication privacy, and protect against censorship and state surveillance.

User Anonymity and Privacy

  • End-to-end encryption: Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data
  • Anonymous accounts: Allow users to create accounts without requiring personally identifiable information (PII), such as email or phone numbers. How can we balance this with the need to combat spam?
  • Tor and VPN Integration: Ensure compatibility with privacy tools like Tor, and provide guidance on using VPNs.

Data Storage

  • Remove or minimize data collection, including IP addresses, geolocation, and device information. No web server logs.
  • Ephemeral content: auto-deleting posts, messages, etc after a set period.
  • Instance chooser that flags which instances are in unsafe countries.
  • Defederate from instances in unsafe countries?

Communities

  • Private communities - currently all are public
  • Communities where every post is encrypted
  • Approval process to join some communities
  • Better opsec around instance owners, admins and moderators

What else?

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
    27·
    9 hours ago

    The fediverse is plainly just not appropriate for this. The ActivityPub makes too many assumptions that the data is fully public.

    End-to-end encryption: Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data

    That could work probably, it’s a lot of work and will break interoperability but could be done. You’d still have to vet your users very well though, which might contradict the next point. It takes one user to leak everything.

    Anonymous accounts: Allow users to create accounts without requiring personally identifiable information (PII), such as email or phone numbers. How can we balance this with the need to combat spam?

    There’s a fair amount of instances already that will let you sign up with a disposable email

    Tor and VPN Integration: Ensure compatibility with privacy tools like Tor, and provide guidance on using VPNs.

    A fair chunk of instances already allow VPN/Tor traffic. The bigger ones don’t because of spam and CSAM and all that crap, but even Reddit is fully functional over a VPN.

    Remove or minimize data collection, including IP addresses, geolocation, and device information. No web server logs.

    That’d be very hard to enforce, and the instance owners have to do some collection for the sake of being able to handle lawsuits and pass the blame. But you can protect yourself using a VPN or Tor.

    Ephemeral content: auto-deleting posts, messages, etc after a set period.

    As an admin, I can literally just restore last month’s backup and undelete everything that got deleted. If someone’s seen it, you must assume it can at minimum have been screenshot.

    Instance chooser that flags which instances are in unsafe countries.

    Anyone can get a VPS in just about any country, so you’d have to personally verify the owner which is PII and probably one of the most vulnerable part of the group. You take down the owner you take down the whole thing.

    Once again however users have plenty of choices already for that, if you trust your instance’s admins.

    Defederate from instances in unsafe countries?

    Same as previous point. Plus, one can still use the API to fetch the content anyway.

    Better opsec around instance owners, admins and moderators

    Also pretty hard to enforce.