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?
A lock or panick button that immediately wipes everything and makes the logs unusable
Easy support for canaries and transparency from the admins, like on Peertube where you’re incentivised to write something about your newly installed instance, where it’s located etc
Maybe take inspiration from European GDPR, assess which information can be used for what, make it transparent to the user what gets stored where and why… Somewhat assisted by the software ao not every admin has to figure that out on their own.
secure DMs
Btw, nice atmosphere here /s I don’t think the general Lemmy audience is very receptive to change. I mean sure, this contradicts with a few fundamentals within how this place is designed. But I think we should make an effort. If I remember correctly, social media played an important role in recent (peaceful) protests and opposition. Like the Arab Spring. And nowadays the big social media platforms are bootlickers and likely to cooperate with the problematic administration. So it’s down to the Fediverse if we want to address a general audience. I don’t think a complex peer-to-peer solution, maybe backed by onion routing and elaborate encrytion is going to be appealing to the masses. It’d be the correct tool for proper confident conversation. But likely not the tool that connects the millions of regular people.
And I’d aegue “defederate from instances in unsafe countries” doesn’t work. We have to treat every one as unsafe and not federate private information in the first place. All other optiins are just error-prone and likely easy to circumvent.