I see some understandable concerns with the potential implementation of MLS (Messaging Layer Security) in the fediverse, because it would make moderation harder.

The thing is, while it's an understandable concern, if you simply replace the word "moderation" with "law enforcement" you'll understand why Chat Control exists.

And while I totally get where both come from, if you want security and privacy to work, I simply think there ought to be a limit to it. Otherwise you simply cannot have them.

"what do you mean you can't have them"

Think about it. If you extrapolate from needing access for the innocent purposes of moderation, or law enforcement, then there's just no limit, no end to it, it inherently means privacy and also security are broken.

It means someone can break open your https streams and watch your banking transactions, it means any and everything is fair game, until you set limits to it.

And I think it's fair for the limit to be right at e.g those encrypted messages.

@anthropy Most of the criticism I've seen directed at MLS and end-to-end encryption in the Fediverse has less to do with moderation and more to do with the practicality of its implementation. It's one thing to have end-to-end encryption when you have a few clients trying to communicate with each other through an intermediary, but another when you have potentially tens of thousands of clients attempting to interact through hundreds of intermediaries. Even MLS caps out around 50k clients, and that is largely theoretical. Matrix is the closest we've seen to implementing something like that, and it comes with some pretty heavy restrictions.

Unless you mean that only DMs should be encrypted? Then the problem there becomes at one point is something considered a DM. DMs in the Fediverse are largely a side effect of how ActivityPub's privacy controls work, they're not built as a separate feature. In order to have MLS for DMs, you'd effectively have to build out a different protocol and implementation, stapling on an instant messenger to the software like how Twitter and Bluesky do it. It just seems, to me, to be outside of the scope of what Mastodon et al. are meant to be. I personally like the way the DMs work and it makes more sense to me for people to use dedicated messaging software if they'd prefer to have encrypted messaging.

@Rusty @anthropy i think DMs on the fediverse should either become end-to-end encrypted or be removed entirely, they are very unclear about the exact privacy considerations of these and if you are “meant to use a proper messenger” that just removes an avenue for Choosing Wrong

@Rusty @anthropy mastodon in particular (and then copied by most other implementations) also makes a lot of privacy decisions on your behalf. i think my favorite one is how it at no point tells you that each vote in a poll is attributable to the user voting for it

@charlotte @Rusty I think DMs as is are also fine, they could just be improved; they're already just as secure and private as messages on Discord, Telegram (unless you use their e2ee mproto thing which literally nobody does), Slack, Teams, etc etc.
Most things don't have end to end encryption. You are still using HTTPS encryption towards and from the server. The main issue is if you e.g accidentally mention someone you didn't want to mention, because they get pulled into the conversation hah

@Rusty that's a fair criticism honestly, I hadn't seen anyone saying that so far.

And aside from the performance objections, I think mastodon/fedi is a bit weird in that sense. If you e.g make a followers-only account and only ever post followers-only interactions, you can technically make a little "private circle", social media style group chats, which COULD be secure, if MLS was there. So I do understand the appeal, also beyond DMs, which I also believe don't need a protocol if MLS works well

@anthropy You conceivably could but it'd really complicate the software under the hood because you'd have to distinguish which posts should be encrypted and how to exchange keys if someone goes from not having access to a given post to suddenly being allowed to access it (ie if they follow you), not to mention all of the usual headaches that come with key management on end-to-end encrypted software. Right now the Fediverse treats every post equally, just with different access controls (effectively just some different flags in the header), but suddenly it'd have to be a lot more intelligent about which posts need to be encrypted and how.

The other thing is, well, would end-to-end encryption even be worth it for semi-public posts? All it would take is one person in the chain to share their keys and suddenly anyone would be able to access the post. I get the appeal for DMs, but for followers-only posts it would become orders of magnitude more pointless with each new follower.

I think it's better for people to know that Fedi is, by its nature, a public platform and they should be conscientious about what they post. End-to-end encryption makes a lot of sense for messaging apps, but I think for microblogs the idea should be that, since they are a blog, they're going to be public to some degree. ​

@anthropy @charlotte That's actually why I really like that they changed the privacy setting from Direct message (or whatever it was before) to "Mentioned people only" ​ It's a lot more clear about who's going to see it.

@Rusty @anthropy the akkoma description still remains

This post will only be visible to the mentioned users at the beginning of the message.

which is not how it works. i pinged the user i was reporting via dms to an admin and the reported user could see it 🙈

@charlotte @anthropy Wow that's awful. ​

@charlotte @Rusty xD that's actively deceptive wth? I feel like UI is a large part of the problem, and I agree that just being upfront about who gets to see it makes much more sense. Unless you can somehow fix it of course, but even then you'd have to be upfront first. I never get why developers would promise things they just don't have implemented

@Rusty I honestly don't disagree with your argument, somewhere it feels weird to try to make social media, which is inherently somewhat public, private.

But I also think the brilliant thing here is that it doesn't have to be complicated, neither for the user nor codebase:
- Fedi already uses per user keys, just not for encryption
- you could make the entire thing optional with some checkboxes in your settings somewhere.

If anything I somewhat suspect DDoS/performance is the main issue there 🤔

@anthropy Considering how much Authorized Fetch can degrade server performance I'd imagine, yeah, it's a performance thing. It doesn't help that Mastodon itself is already a memory hog. ​

I didn't know we had per-user keys though. ​ How does that work?

@Rusty it's purely for auth AFAIK! To make sure someone isn't impersonating your account and such

Here's one of the pages related to it (I think, it's hard to find a page that specifically talks about the keys): https://www.w3.org/wiki/ActivityPub/Primer/Authentication_Authorization

@anthropy Ohhh ​ Yeah that makes sense.