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?
This is also why I get so pissed about the Fediverse “don’t scrape me bro” crybabies and their whole talk about “consent-based following”.
Malicious actors do not ask for consent. Malicious actors know how to bypass authorized fetch. Malicious actors will have absolute no qualms creating accounts on the same server as you just to be able to follow you. You can even argue that malicious actors will even build an instance that you find super appealing in order to be able to collect your communication.
It doesn’t matter how you feel you are entitled to a “safe space”, if you are talking in public. People might ignore you, but they are never go around with their ears covered just because you are asking them to.