Melpomene

Agree, which is why I shared. Just looping you in as a courtesy!

Email is only protected under certain circumstances, and the law does not contemplate protection against the provider… only the provider’s disclosure of your email to third parties. However, internal disclosure is, as far as I know, not prohibited.

Refer to the Email Privacy Act (USA) and the GDPR for more info.

Note: Best to consult a privacy lawyer versus a Melpomene if you have questions. @RoboRay

Direct messages, private messages, whatever you want to call them… have ALWAYS been available to your social media hosts. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Discord… they can all read your private communications if they choose to do so. While I’d support E2EE for private messages for kBin etc, pretending that this is some sort of flaw inherent to the fediverse is inaccurate. It’s fair to want the fediverse to be better. It is not fair to hold it to a standard no one has ever applied to other social media.

I know I know… joking but not joking, there. What else should we expect from the company that tried to intentionally induce depression in users just to see if they could?

Blood type: Caffeinated.

If that’s not an option, I don’t want to play.

I was unsure at first, but given the history of big names killing federated projects, well. I’d rather not risk it.

Careful, they’re collecting your emotional state too.

I’d say blood type and sex life, but that’s probably under the “other information” category.

I see it a bit differently. For me, the point of activitypub is to decentralize. One of the wonderful things about activitypub and the fediverse is that while it supports universal federation, it also allows people to contemplate smaller, integrated communities. I never saw it as an “all or nothing” proposition; if a community like Beehaw wants to select their federation partners carefully, that’s absolutely okay.

If an instance decides that Meta, or Tumblr, or notareal.in.stance don’t fit their community vibe and they exclude them from federation, that’s… the fediverse working properly. Having the ability to interconnect is wonderful… but we should not expect that all instances will want to interconnect with everyone else.

The more I read, the more I am in the camp of “let’s not.” Meta has rarely acted in the best interests of its own users; from their unethical experiments into causing depression to their privacy issue to… well, everything, they are classic examples of bad actors. The fediverse is not secure enough or big enough to counter Meta’s takeover if we open that door… there’s a reason we’re in the fediverse and not the metaverse, after all.

The decision of whether to federate is up to the individual instances, and I’d not want it any other way. But I do think we should be encouraging instances to hold off on Meta-fying. Else, we’ll be fighting Meta in a game that they’re much better at than any of us are ever likely to be.

And this is different then you having to have a Twitter, Google, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc etc account how exactly? Difference with federated networks is that those “insular echo chambers” (not my experience, but hey) can work together and in actuality do work well together.

An instance is an individual installation of the (Lemmy / Kbin / Mastodon) system. One person might be hosting something on Docker, another might pay a web host, another might just have an old Linux box they set up with a static IP and such. Each instance is self-contained and could function as an independent entity but there are also tools built in that let those independently hosted instances talk and share.

I like to liken it to email providers for simplicity. Gmail and Hotmail are independently hosted, COULD function as independent, internal only systems… but they use common protocols to talk and share email.

Yeah, that’s how I took it too. Beehaw never pretended to be anything but a close knit community that prides itself on positive interactions. Defederating from larger instances made sense for them because they couldn’t maintain that vibe given the current state of Lemmy. Hopefully, as these platforms mature, they can reconsider.

@someguy3

@DaughterOfMars @this_is_router

Large email providers aren’t likely to shut down, but smaller ones might… which is the concern for users on instances. Having a way to export / import one’s account to a new instance would be ideal; not sure how a decentralized ID might work but it would be exciting to have.

Ooh, can we vote out admins too?

I kid, I kid. Sort of.