Useful report from the Social Web Foundation after a privacy forum in Norway. From the first bullet point of next actions:
Create standard metadata fields within ActivityPub to indicate content visibility, consent preferences, and sharing restrictions across servers.
There is a tension in the fediverse between consent and the open web. It’s difficult to balance both ideals without over-complicating everything. Look at how confusing private mentions in Mastodon are.
@manton fwiw I still don’t think private mentions work right with Micro.blog though I’m unsure if it’s even worth figuring out.
@jsonbecker Thanks. I do sometimes get private mentions. I’ll test some more. But yeah, it’s mostly a dead end until Mastodon has encrypted messaging.
@manton “Private mentions”? Like, you @- someone and only they know about it? How does that work? What does it even mean?
@jsonbecker Very inconsistent to say the least. That’s the joy of an open source and federated system. Everyone/thing has a different take on shiz.
@jsonbecker Oh right. Followers-only can’t be properly handled in Micro.blog right now because of the chance that posts leak out to the public.
@devilgate Yeah, in Mastodon it was intended to be like direct messaging, but it’s a little more convoluted than that. When we receive one in Micro.blog, we send an email to you.
@manton yeah that was my impression. That the feature doesn’t really offer the safety expected once you leave mastodon (or possibly even within)
@phillycodehound the lack of standard test suite and implementation that’s agreed upon really frustrates me.