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?
I know you’re a Piefed developer, so you probably know what’s possible and what’s not better than me. But honestly, the encryption part makes me think you probably want a new protocol designed with that in mind from the start. In my opinion, it’s too destructive for compatibility with other ActivityPub software and instances running older versions of them especially.
Combating spam despite the simplified account creation will probably require the implementation of something like Reddit’s karma system. Which isn’t a very popular idea I think.
Regarding the ephemeral content… please don’t. It might sound cool on paper, but it just adds FOMO. We shouldn’t promote doomscrolling and brainrot with the addition of features which require you to quickly scroll through shit to not miss out on posts that disappear after a timer has passed.
Yes, but that’s Ok, not every community needs to federate outside PieFed. There can be a mix of insecure (widely-compatible) and secure (PieFed only) communities. PieFed does not be need to be held back by the limitations of ActivityPub as we know it today.