this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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I'm kind of tired of social networks offering even the pretense of privacy. Just loudly proclaim that everything is public but clients can filter out shit you don't wanna see.
That doesn't work for vulnerable minorities. Manually filtering each shitty person after you step in their shit gets old. Coupled with the fact that not shutting down shitty people just means more shitty people are likely to turn up.
It's not sustainable
It's the unfortunate reality. Social networks simply cannot in offer privacy. If they were upfront about it, then people could make rational decisions about what they share.
But instead they (including Mastodon) pretend like they can offer privacy, when they in fact cannot, resulting in people sharing things that they would not otherwise share.
It's not as black and white as you make it. The options aren't "perfect security" and "no security".
The option that most people that experience regular harassment want is "enough security to minimise the shit we have to deal with to a level that is manageable even if it's imperfect"
While you're theoretically right, we've seen in practice that nobody really offers even the imperfect privacy you describe, and on decentralized systems it only becomes harder to solve.
A Facebook style centralized network where you explicitly grant access to every single person who can see your content - is as close as we can get. But nobody is trying to make that kind of social network anymore, because there isn't much demand for it.
If you want a soapbox (Twitter/mastodon/bluesky, Reddit/Lemmy/kbin, Instagram/pixelfed, YouTube/toktok/peertube) then privacy is going to be a dream, especially if decentralized.
Vulnerable folk are looking for community, not a soap box. The goal is to connect with other folk whilst being as free as possible from harassment.
It's absolutely possible to achieve that without perfect privacy controls.
Privacy and being free of (in-context) harassment aren't the same thing. Your posts can all be public but your client can filter out any harassment, for example.
If the goal is privacy so that people who aren't in the community don't know that you're in the community, and don't know what the community is even talking about, I'm skeptical that it's practical. Especially for a decentralized network, I think that the sacrifices needed to make this happen would make the social network unappealing to users. For example, you'd need to make it invite only and restrict who can invite, or turn off any kind of discovery so that you can't find people who aren't already in your circle. At that point you might as well just use a group chat.
They're related. Often, the ability to limit your audience is about making it non trivial for harassers to access your content rather than impossible.
That's not the goal. The goal is to make a community that lets vulnerable folk communicate whilst keeping the harassment to a manageable level and making the sensitive content non trivial to access for random trolls and harassers.
It's not about stopping dedicated individuals, because they can't be stopped in this sort of environment for all the reasons you point out. It's about minimising harassment from the random drive by bigots
Hmmm I think I understand the intent. I'll have to think on it some more.
My gut tells me that protecting people from drive-by bigotry is antithetical to content/community discovery. And what is a social network without the ability to find new communities to join or new content to see?
Perhaps something like reddit where they can raise the bar for commenting/posting until you've built up karma within the community? That's not a privacy thing though.
What would this look like to you, and how does it relate to privacy? I've got my own biases that affect how I'm looking at the problem, so I'd be interested in getting another perspective.
I think in this context it's meant on a technical level: as far as the fediverse is concerned, there's not a whole lot instances can do. Anyone can just spin up an instance and bypass blocks unless it works on an allowlist basis, which is kind of incompatible with the fediverse if we really want to achieve a reasonable amount of decentralization.
I agree that we shouldn't pretend it's safe for minorities: it's not. If you're a minority joining Mastodon or Lemmy or Mbin, you need to be aware that blocking people and instances has limitations. You can't make your profile entirely private like one would do on Twitter or any of Meta's products. It's all public.
You can hide the bad people from the users but you can't really hide the users from the bad people. You can't even stop people from replying to you on another instance. You can refuse to accept the message on the user's instance, but the other instance can still add comments that don't federate out. Which is kind of worse because it can lead to side discussions you have no way of seeing or participate in to defend yourself and they can be saying a lot of awful things.
Even those are not private.
It’s not sustainable to keep offering poorly designed solutions. People need to understand some basic things about the system they're using. The fediverse isn't a private space and fediverse developers shouldn't be advertising pseudo-private features as private or secure.
A private forum may be useful in that case.