So check it out: Mastodon decided to implement follower-only posts for their users. All good. They did it in a way where they were still broadcasting those posts (described as “private”) in a format that other servers could easily wind up erroneously showing them to random people. That’s not ideal.
Probably the clearest explanation of the root of the problem is this:
Something you may not know about Mastodon’s privacy settings is that they are recommendations, not demands. This means that it is up to each individual server whether or not it chooses to enforce them. For example, you may mark your post with unlisted, which indicates that servers shouldn’t display the post on their global timelines, but servers which don’t implement the unlisted privacy setting still can (and do).
Servers don’t necessarily disregard Mastodon’s privacy settings for malicious reasons. Mastodon’s privacy settings aren’t a part of the original OStatus protocol, and servers which don’t run a recent version of the Mastodon software simply aren’t configured to recognize them. This means that unlisted, private, or even direct posts may end up in places you didn’t expect on one of these servers—like in the public timeline, or a user’s reblogs.
That is super relevant for “private” posts by Mastodon. They fall into the same category as how you’ve been voting on Lemmy posts and comments: This stuff seems private, because it’s being hidden in your UI, but it’s actually being broadcasted out to random untrusted servers behind the scenes, and some server software is going to expose it. It’s simply going to happen. You need to be aware of that. Even if it’s not shown in your UI, it is available.
Anyway, Pixelfed had a bug in its handling of those types of posts, which meant that in some circumstances it would show them to everyone. Somebody wrote on her blog about how her partner has been posting sensitive information as “private,” and Pixelfed was exposing it, and how it’s a massive problem. For some reason, Dansup (Pixelfed author) taking it seriously and fixing the problem and pushing out a new version within a few days only made this person more upset, because in her (IMO incorrect) opinion, the way Dansup had done it was wrong.
I think the blog-writer is just mistaken about some of the technical issues involved. It sounds like she’s planning on telling her partner that it’s still okay to be posting her private stuff on Mastodon, marked “private,” now that Pixelfed and only Pixelfed has fixed the issue. I think that’s a huge mistake for reasons that should be obvious. It sounds like she’s very upset that Dansup made it explicit that he was fixing this issue, thinking that even exposing it in commit comments (which as we know get way more readership than blog posts) would mean people knew about it, and the less people that knew about it, the safer her partner’s information would be since she is continuing to do this apparently. You will not be surprised to discover that I think that type of thinking is also a mistake.
That’s not even what I want to talk about, though. I have done security-related work professionally before, so maybe I look at this stuff from a different perspective than this lady does. What I want to talk about is this type of comments on Lemmy, when this situation got posted here under the title “Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances”:
Non-malicious servers aren’t supposed to do what Pixelfed did.
Pixelfed got caught with its pants down
rtfm and do NOT give a rest to bad behaving software
dansup remains either incompetent for implementing badly something easy or toxic for federating ignoring what the federation requires
i completely blame pixelfed here: it breaks trust in transit and that’s unacceptable because it makes the system untrustworthy
periodic reminder to not touch dansup software and to move away from pixelfed and loops
dansup is not competent and quite problematic and it’s not even over
developers with less funding (even 0) contributed way more to fedi, they’re just less vocal
dansup is all bark no bite, stop falling for it
dansup showed quite some incompetence in handling security, delivering features, communicating clearly and honestly and treating properly third party devs
I sort of started out in the ensuing conversation just explaining the issues involved, because they are subtle, but there are people who are still sending me messages a day later insisting that Dansup is a big piece of shit and he broke the internet on purpose. They’re also consistently upset, among other reasons, that he’s getting paid because people like the stuff he made and gave away, and chose to back his Kickstarter. Very upset. I keep hearing about it.
This is not the first time, or even the first time with Dansup. From time to time, I see this with some kind of person on the Fediverse who’s doing something. Usually someone who’s giving away their time to do something for everyone else. Then there’s some giant outcry that they are “problematic” or awful on purpose in some way. With Dansup at least, every time I’ve looked at it, it’s mostly been trumped-up nonsense. The worst it ever is, in actuality, is “he got mad and posted an angry status HOW DARE HE.” Usually it is based more or less on nothing.
Dansup isn’t just a person making free software, who sometimes posts angry unreasonable statuses or gets embroiled in drama for some reason because he is human and has human emotions. He’s the worst. He is toxic and unhinged. He is keeping his Loops code secret and breaking his promises. He makes money. He broke privacy for everyone (no don’t tell me any details about the protocol or why he didn’t he broke it for everyone) (and don’t tell me he fixed it in a few days and pushed out a new version that just makes it worse because he put it in the notes and it’ll be hard for people to upgrade anyway so it doesn’t count)
And so on.
Some particular moderator isn’t just a person who sometimes makes poor moderation decisions and then doubles down on them. No, he is:
a racist and a zionist and will do whatever he can to delete pro-Palestinian posts, or posts that criticize Israel.
a vile, racist, zionist piece of shit, and anyone who defends or supports him is sitting at the table with him and accepts those labels for themselves.
And so on. The exact same pattern happened with a different lemmy.world mod who was extensively harassed for months for various made-up bullshit, all the way up until the time where he (related or not) decided to stop modding altogether.
It’s weird. Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have? Why are people so un-amenable to someone trying to say “actually it’s not that simple”, to the point that a day later my inbox is still getting peppered with insistences that Dansup is the worst on this private-posts issue, and I’m completely wrong and incompetent for thinking otherwise and all the references I’ve been digging up and sending to try to illustrate the point are just more proof that I’m horrible?
Guys: Chill out.
I would just recommend, if you are one of these people that likes to double down on all this stuff and get all amped-up about how some particular fediverse person is “problematic” or “toxic” or various other vague insinuations, or you feel the need to bring up all kinds of past drama any time anything at all happens with the person, that you not.
I am probably guilty of this sometimes. I definitely like to give people hell sometimes, if in my opinion they are doing something that’s causing a problem. But the extent to which the fediverse seems to like to do this stuff just seems really extreme to me, and a lot of times what it’s based on is just weird petty bullying nonsense.
Just take it it with a grain of salt, too, if you see it, is also what I’m saying. Whether it comes from me or whoever. A lot of times, the issue doesn’t look like such a huge deal once you strip away the histrionics and the assumption that everyone’s being malicious on purpose. Doubly so if the emotion and the innuendo is running way ahead of what the actual facts are.
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Some people have privacy expectations that are not realistic in an unencrypted, federated, heterogeneous environment run by hobbyist volunteers in their spare time.
It you have something private and sensitive to share with a small audience, make a group chat on Signal. Don’t invite any reporters.
Nothing is private on the fediverse, and Mastodon’s bodge only gives the illusion of privacy. There should be zero expectation that any fediverse software will follow their non-standard extensions.
This is my thought on it, too. I don’t disagree with any of the point OP is making, but I think a larger issue is people misusing ActivityPub platforms and trying to make them into something they’re not. It’s not meant to be a messenger, it’s not meant for privacy. Everything being public and transparent is part of the core design of the Fediverse. The idea of private groups/posts on the Fediverse seems counterintuitive to me.
Completely agree.
It is fine if you want to add privacy to a federated platform. If you wanted to, you would need to think through how to do it (probably it would involve either adding something specific and very carefully laid-out to the ActivityPub spec, or just doing like Lemmy does and switching to a whole other protocol like Matrix and warning the users that anything over ActivityPub is not private). Neither of those is what Mastodon did, but now they’re going around telling users they can have private posts, which is why I think they’re ultimately at fault in the situation that kicked off this whole shebang.
Just a random thought, if there is a need for privacy wouldn’t it be possible to create public / private encryption key for users so messages can be encrypted and exchanged.
This way what would be public is that there’s an exchange but nobody would be able to know what was said. It would make it at least message content private.
To make it a step further could exchange between servers also use it to encrypt which users exchange private message. I am thinking it could make it fully private then. Only sender and receiver servers could know which users were private messaging.
To keep it secure from the servers themself would require users to handle the encryption. See PGP for an idea of how much uptake that’s likely to get. If you mean for the servers to handle the encryption, that’s already the case, and the issue right now is that servers are privy to what users do, and by nature are a 3rd party in the convo.
I definitely think it’s important to make people aware of the difference in the fedeiverse. Especially since that is not how it worked in non-federated social media
Well, where are you all when the Fedi cheerleading squad keeps posting about how bad it is that this or that competitor stores this or that information and how secure and private and great it is in Fedi servers because they don’t store anything?
Because I’ve spent years chiming in to explain these things in those and it normally just gets people angry and complaining that you’re shilling for corporate social media or whatever. The image being projected, both accidentally and on purpose is that no centralized data collection means your data on Fedi is private when it is extremely not.
It’s perhaps a communication problem, where the privacy settings should clearly state this. Or these settings shouldn’t be offered. But maybe this current structure is fine for most people?
Regardless, it’s how existing social media used to work. In that sense, federated social media can’t offer an alternative and that could be a problem for some.
Yeah, but offering something that claims to be private, but isn’t, is actually much worse than refusing to offer something that’s private. Even if people want the private feature.
Truly private posts just are going to require something that isn’t ActivityPub, because ActivityPub just isn’t designed to give assurances about what’s going to happen to an activity that you are sending off to some other server. Or, the other option would be to go through the whole process of adding it into the spec in a thought through fashion instead of just hacking it in and moving on. Although, I do kind of get why Mastodon doesn’t want to go through that snail’s pace process for every single protocol change they would need to be able to make things work.
But the extent to which the fediverse seems to like to do this stuff just seems really extreme to me, and a lot of times what it’s based on is just weird petty bullying nonsense.
Not saying that it isn’t a problem, but as someone who’s been Around™ online, this is pretty par-for-the-course stuff.
Ah, to remember the glory days of Livejournal and Tumblr… and don’t get me started back in the days when every fandom had a dozen sites which all hated each other for vague and extremely personal reasons.
and don’t get me started back in the days when every fandom had a dozen sites which all hated each other for vague and extremely personal reasons.
Oh man, this brings me back.
Remember the time in the late 90s and early 2000s when even a niche topics had like 3-4 large community sites with active forums. More popular topics could easily have like 10-20 communities.
And there was a lot of drama both within and between communities.
It’s kind sad that we lost this, although lemmy is a solid modern alternative, just needs much more users. Enough users for even niche topics to have multiple active communities with their own spin/focus on a given topics.
On the plus side, I am glad I got to experience the early pre-corporate internet. It was good times.
I’ve seen people say that Farcebork was like being in a small town, actively making that kind of everyone-knowing-everyone’s-business a reality again for communities fractured by urban anonymity.
But that was there in spades in the early internet, it’s just that normies hadn’t been beaten over the head by social conditioning by the corporate overlords yet to join in.
It’s human nature to think and behave tribally. So we should expect it to continue in the Fediverse, we just can’t shove the problem over to someone else to manage and take their tithe in eyeballs, and thus fracture our communities all over again: we have to do it ourselves. Drama fucking sucks, wherever is found, but we have to accept it’s our job to manage if we don’t want to trade our freedom for a padded cell.
Yeah, you’re not wrong. I definitely don’t think it is a fediverse-only problem. Something changed culturally between Usenet and the things that came after.
I was thinking about this earlier today: There was a wonderful little renaissance that happened around the time of the Napster / Slashdot / flash game era, when “it’s the internet so of course it is awful” was in abeyance for a little bit of time and things were cool (as well as being pretty creative, and generally sensible.) I think a lot of what I’m upset about here is not so much that people are being catty (as you said, that’s just kind of the nature of the beast), but that it’s so disconnected from reality. People will say wild made-up nonsense and then other people will take it seriously. Of course, yes, that’s not exactly new or a fedi specific problem…
Something changed culturally between Usenet and the things that came after.
Me, who only started into online communities in the early 2000s:
See, but as I was saying above about the privacy stuff, the perception is supposed to be that this is somehow “the alogrithm’s fault” or caused on purpose by corporate media to boost engagement.
Even your take is letting Fedi design off the hook, IMO. The answer here isn’t “oh, well, what can you do?” it’s designing proper moderation tools.
I know people get mad when you praise Bluesky around these parts, but they have an actually good block system, compared to Masto, Lemmy and Fedi in general. It really helps cut this crap short.
This guy is being reasonable, get the pitchforks!
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say you’re both wrong. Here me out.
As other commenters have said, there should never be any expectation of privacy on the fediverse. DMs here and private items are not actually private, they’re quite literally blasted out to anyone who listens. I feel like I have to say that a lot. I actually like how Lemmy handles it, it warns you that it’s unencrypted and that it recommends Matrix (and you can put your matrix handle on your profile).
However. I’m also disillusioned by Dansup. He made a great project with Pixelfed. It got off the ground and has a great following. However, I’ve read through the code, I’ve tried to spin it up, hell even tried to help contribute - but it’s a spaghetti’d mess of unmaintainable code. What irks me is rather than dive in and fix the code, help those who honestly want to spin up his projects, he starts a completely separate project (off the same spaghetti’d base that barely scales), and goes on a whole PR junket talking about it. Then when I see people asking questions of his code or how to do things he usually jumps down their throats - or completely ignores them.
And honestly the biggest thing that irked me was that I didn’t feel he gave credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people who work to make the fediverse work. Pixelfed is a great experience - but it’s one of many all working together, and the developers are a huge chunk, but you have the infrastructure, us admins hosting, those out there vocalizing it, those trying to start communities, it’s an ecosystem, and I just felt like he ignored the fediverse and instead pushed Pixelfed.
What parts of the codebase did you look at and not like how they were implemented?
Why is it a problem if he makes server software and then publicizes it? Like can you show a couple of examples of authors of some other software who are giving credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people, and how they are giving credit? What are they doing differently than Dansup?
A great example is his handling of Laravel, scaling, and Docker. It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have a huge understanding of Docker - or at least hasn’t managed docker images at scale. A huge thing there that I ran into constantly is that the Pixelfed containers both are 1) Stateful and worse than that 2) depend on each other’s volumes. These are both anti patterns specifically called out in the docker best practices. It ultimately means that the Pixelfed containers must share the same host as it’s workers. He put a lot of time and effort into building scripts that would simplify the setup for a docker compose file, but never thought horizontally - scaling these containers out on a cluster or separating workers off away from the web-api nodes at all.
I spent 3 weeks trying to de-tangle that all and got nowhere. I’ve been watching the guys over at Pixelfed Glitch ( a fork of pixelfed ), and from what I see they’re trying to do the same thing. I wish them godspeed. Until then, I can’t recommend Pixelfed as it just can’t horizontally scale. Sure you can throw a more expensive machine at the problem, but that’s not a fix.
As for the last, I don’t have any examples - and I think that’s because no one else has gone on a press junket like he has. The owners of Mastodon started a foundation a while back, I think that’s the most official news I’ve heard out of them. I think that’s what bothered me - for the vast majority of people that was their first chance to hear about the open web. Instead of saying “We have a thing called the fediverse. I’ll spare you the details but you can choose Pixelfed, Mastodon, even Wordpress or many others, and they all work together”. Instead all I heard anywhere was Pixelfed. Feel free to call BS there, maybe he did somewhere and I just missed it.
“Doesn’t scale because the containers are set up wrong” is different from “unmaintainable code” though. What of the code was bad? I’ve looked at a bunch of fedi projects and Pixelfed didn’t strike me as either particularly good or particularly bad.
As for the last, I don’t have any examples
?
I mean, that is sort of what I expected. Mastodon doesn’t publicize Wordpress. Lemmy doesn’t publicize mbin. They all, mostly, mention a little bit of the context that they can interoperate with other federated services, but it doesn’t strike me as weird or malicious that someone would write a project and then promote that project. That sounds normal.
Actually, both Mastodon and Lemmy chose to implement sort of their own versions of ActivityPub, and that actually does strike me as selfish behavior. It means that mostly they are their own independent platforms that run “on top of” ActivityPub instead of enabling full interoperation with the other stuff. Doing it that way was hard to avoid, because the design of ActivityPub to me isn’t great, but this situation is actually a perfect example of that: Mastodon implemented a new feature in a way that would break (in a really jarring privacy-violating-to-some-extent way) until everyone else copied their implementation exactly. I’m not aware of Pixelfed doing anything like that. Mastodon and Lemmy can both get away with presenting themselves as “the fediverse” and forcing everyone else into copying one implementation or the other if they want things to actually work, and they both show very little interest in making it easy. If you want to pick out sins of various fedi projects to start to point out that are disrespecting the other projects in the space, something like that is where I would start.
Everyone I ever talked to told me “well yes we have to implement our own version of ActivityPub because AP is under-defined”. In most cases it is defined what AP does, but not how. Therefore individual programers go in and figure out on their own how a certain thing they are building for their platform should be structured in AP.
Now, every project could simply go “I will copy the way Pixelfed implements it”. But why should PF have that priviledge?
deleted by creator
I don’t think that blog author is male, btw.
Oop. She is not. Fixed.
Unfortunately it’s just a ubiquitous reality that people are the worst.
This kind of indirect bullying is kind of unavoidable online, because of the lack of direct contact, you don’t empathize much with the other sensitive being. Until we get that perfect education to civility that may happen in 2000 years if we still exist. Maybe one solution is to have strong rules and moderation about personal attacks. But then it’s the moderators that will get bullied for censorship and end up crucified on the power tripping bastard community.
And you have summed up why I block those communities. There are surely cases of people abusing power, but a majority of it is just people wanting to stir up shit.
Back when I was younger and naïve, I would Nicolas Cage OP.
I’m now more mature and open minded, and I can say I wholesomely agree with @Zak@lemmy.world’s statement ITT.
Technologists have very little patience for people that are technologically illiterate. And when you’re fighting to liberate people against corporations that send hitlists against you, patience runs faster. My hope is that people like OP can empathize that while yes, public technologies can be harmful and downright hostile, they can take their time to comprehend concepts technologist took their time to write down and document for.
If you want private conversations with peers, it must be encrypted, it must be forward secret, and it must be authenticatable.
XMPP, SimpleXchat, & Signal are the only three that fit these specifications.
I have the first two (check my bio👈😎👈), the latter I do not trust.
the latter I do not trust.
Am I reading the article wrong? Is it not a good thing that they refused to comply with the hostile anti-encryption law?
They refused to operate ON a country with a hostile anti encryption law as a threat.
Signal could have mocked the France government for being authoritarian fascist censorious anti-mathematics pieces of turd, but leave USERS stuck in France with the danger of the government’s bs law.
A metaphor for ease of comprehension: Signal threatens a farmer for hunting chicken down, by ceasing all freeing-chicken-from-the-farm operations. Not killing the farmer, but leaving the chicken without the tools to liberate themselves.
Yes, I read Animal Farm.
It sounds like she’s very upset that Dansup made it explicit that he was fixing this issue, thinking that even exposing it in commit comments (which as we know get way more readership than blog posts) would mean people knew about it, and the less people that knew about it, the safer her partner’s information would be since she is continuing to do this apparently. You will not be surprised to discover that I think that type of thinking is also a mistake.
I agreed with you at first because from your description it sounded like she was saying security through obscurity was a good thing. But that’s not the case.
What she’s saying in the blog post is that this a 0-day and should be handled according to the best practices for 0-day disclosure.
You have to decide if you want to
- publish the findings before the fix -> more people will know and exploit the vulnerability but users might be aware and may or may not be able to mitigate sharing even more
- publish the findings after the fix -> the opposite
I don’t pretend to know enough to judge which option is the best. But I can’t fault the blog author for pointing out that Dansup didn’t follow best practices.
more people will know and exploit the vulnerability
It’s not even a vulnerability, it’s how AP works by design, is the issue at hand here. Mastodon decided they wanted to implement something not supported by AP, and everybody else had to take the heat for not ‘doing it right’.
That is still not the point the commenter and the original blog author were making.
What we can take away from this episode is that Pixelfed implemented the fix in a way that suggests they would not handle a 0 day exploit with a “reql” vulnerability well. And having followed dansup’s projects for a while that doesnt surprise me, because he clearly prefers to work “chaoticly” than in a structured, regulated way.
The “taking the heat” is something completely seprrate and boils down to stupid people on the internet needing to be angry at someone.
I’m not sure you can make that conclusion. This isn’t a real vulnerability, and this isn’t a surprise to anybody who knows how the AP protocol works. Dansup didn’t reveal anything that was previously unknown, the blog author just has an axe to grind. It’s unfair to assume that an actual 0 day vulnerability would have been treated the same way.
I’d argue that it is still a vulnerability in this scenario. But point taken, it’s always important to find the root cause and not just put blame on the person who stumbled into the trap.
Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have?
I have a pet theory about this!
Humans can’t easily empathize with strings of text the way they do with voices and faces. When you read my posts you read it in your voice; I might as well be a figment of your imagination. As far as your subconscious is concerned, I am not actually a person. I’m an imaginary friend at best and an imaginary enemy at worst.
When someone beats up on me it’s because they’re imagining me as an enemy NPC, not a person with thoughts and feelings.
This is why arguing on the internet is basically pointless. We’re all just random encounters in the posting RPG.
Just as a mild counterexample, I’ve personally changed my views quite drastically over my time on reddit and now lemmy, and most of it was from individuals just sharing their own perspective.
I held some latent bigotry and misogyny, part of which I picked in my day to day life, and partly from 4ch. I won’t say I’ve eliminated it completely, but I think I’ve become a better person from my interactions online.
If we’re not out here trying to actively learn from and help other people, then what the heck are we doing?
I think you can overcome the empathy gap caused by the anonymous text format if you make the effort to empathize with people on the internet, but it requires you to want to make the effort in the first place.
Empathy offline or over video or on the phone is much more instinctual - in fact, it requires effort to resist empathy.
Honestly? I live in a small town, and face to face isn’t much better. People are incredibly bigoted, and might be polite to your face but incredibly judgemental and small minded, especially to anyone perceived as different. Empathy is a skill that needs to be practised, like meditation. And many people lack it both online and off.
Yeah. I do think communicating over the internet even with people you disagree with is possible to do, and it can be super productive. Can be. It just takes conscious effort to do so, I guess not much different from when you can talk them out face-to-face.
And because you can’t punch me in the face over the Internet (yet).
Yeah. There are a lot of subtle cues that keep things in check, that let people express frustration or disagreement with each other and it still be okay and kept in a balanced fashion, when it’s happening in person. In typing that all goes out the window. It takes conscious effort to be able to remember the social aspect and not just get carried away with your typing and decide the other person is horrible and you need to attack (or just take something without the right context and think they’re going on the attack when they’re not.) Like I say, I’m guilty of treating it pretty carelessly sometimes too.
Can’t confirm. When I was young and hanging out in online chat rooms, I regarded the others as real and experienced a full range of emotions toward them. They were my acquaintances, friends, crushes, or enemies. Definitely didn’t see them as NPCs. If I had, I would never have had such strong feelings about any of them.
But that’s just me. Others’ mileage may vary.
Chatrooms might be different. In a chatroom you get to know different users, even if you never know them as anything other than BigBallz420
On message boards or comments sections, though, there’s too many people to keep track of. You might never hear from me again. That makes it a lot harder, I think.
But yeah, mileage may vary.
Also this isn’t really a super fleshed out theory based on actual evidence. Just vibes.
