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?
Right, like the other person says, Lemmy fundamentally doesn’t work like that. IDK what Piefed is. Ironically, in a sense, 4chan was ahead of us by decades.
piefed is Lemmy, but with 🥧
But do users get fed?
Piefed is another fediverse link aggregator project, like lemmy and kbin
https://piefed.social/
You’ll periodically see piefed accounts if you pay attention to user instances here :)
After a brief period of lawlessness, 4chan became a big gluey honeypot on behalf of every big law enforcement agency in the country. You’d have been a lot better off posting your drug offers and revenge porn in a Yahoo Chess chat room.
You’re not completely wrong, though. The idea of thinking through some basic measures like Tor-friendliness and anonymous signups (as if requiring an email address does a microgram’s worth of good to prevent abusive users from signing up) sounds okay, but grafting real OPSEC against the government onto these federated platforms at this stage sounds nigh-impossible to do in any reliable fashion.
I’ve been on Lemmy since May. I’ve never been on 4Chan, but I’ve heard stories of who 4Chan users are, and what their posts are.
God, I HOPE they aren’t way ahead of us…
If Margaret Mead at her age smoked grass