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?
Glossing over the fact that DOJ can’t subpoena instances like world as they are outside the US (but, like world, may be subject to EU GDPR) having an account without PII if your IP address is all over the servers isn’t going to save you.
You’re right, that’s very true.
Like I said, I don’t think it’s really what a platform like lemmy is for