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?
Maybe, I am not very familiar how activitypub works. Maybe he can work around it.
ActivityPub is how federation is accomplished. You cannot “work around” how the system is fundamentally designed. ActivityPub might get E2E encryption on DMs at some point but the rest is simply not possible if you want to be able to interact with the rest of the Fediverse.
Theoretically in the future PieFed might not be limited to only using ActivityPub, or only using Lemmy-compatible ActivityPub.
Hmm that’s fair. I wasn’t aware of the differences between Piefed and Lemmy when I first made my comments, but I do wish you luck with implementing all this! Piefed seems cool, guess I’ll have to check it out a bit more in depth lol