i see that Mike Macgirvin 🖥️ chimed in already, not saying much though.

The biggest privacy issue with Mastodon and other platforms like it is that it was never meant for privacy at all. They are broadcast platforms. Everything you post, except private messages, are public. The whole point is for your post to reach an audience.

Compare that with Hubzilla or Streams, which can connect to the fediverse, but are also allow private conversations, private groups, and private file sharing. It is a completely different concept.

What it boils down to is you can't have privacy when you use a megaphone to broadcast your posts far and wide. You need a different tool if you want privacy.

yes, i understand the principle. personally i don't care very much about privacy. anything i want to keep private, i keep away from the internet.

but to enter into a thread like the one i quoted, where mike gave a short comment, i would have to know how our privacy works in detail, specially in relation to AP / mastodon, and right now i don't. from my HZ identity i can't connect to the AP world properly.

i'm not really a social person, neither on- nor offline. i use HZ, now also mastodon in bouts, depending what goes on in my life and around me.  i set up this HZ instance ages ago, it's still at 7.2 because the PHP version on my VPS won't allow more. i have to set up the VPS fresh, no point just adding PHP versions, then i'll re-install HZ, also streams, and will have a better idea, again.

during my short stint with mastodon i can see that info about the rest of the fediverse, nomadic identity in particular, would probably do some good. that's why i posted this here, if somebody else wanted to chime in.

of course, preaching from 'rival' projects isn't taken very well, so it would have to be careful and with solid knowledge -- which i don't have right now. @mike has lots of experience with this, that's probably why he wrote only a shor paragraph with no detail in that thread.

I think it's not just about privacy. It is also about community.

The problem with Twitter-style platforms, and even Facebook-style channels, is that you are still using a broadcast methodology most of the time. With Hubzilla or Streams, you can limit your audience, but with ActivityPub, you currently cannot.

Before social media, we had forums, or discussion boards, as they were often called. This created a defined community, and even though the posts we usually visible to the public, you had to be a member of that community to participate in discussions. This means that an admin or moderator can delete unsavory content, and even ban people from the community. This meant you could set up a forum as a safe space with like-minded individuals.

I think that forums and discussion groups like this would be a better solution for vulnerable groups of people. And if we made it federated, people could use their existing fediverse identity to participate in the communities.

Hubzilla and Streams already have this capability, but we need to make some changes to the UI for it to catch on. And we'd also need to set up some communities as examples. (Several of us are working on this part.)

I think eventually, when federation technology is more nature, people will realize that different projects do different things better than others.

If you want to broadcast to the world, perhaps you use something like Mastodon. If you want to publish videos, perhaps you use PeerTube. If you want privacy, you use Hubzilla or Streams. If you want to build a website with fediverse technology, you use Hubzilla. You want to create your own fediverse project, you fork Streams. If you want a community, you add Neuhub to your Hubzilla or Streams server (coming soon).

The main problem right now is that people are trying to use a wrench instead of a hammer to hammer a nail into a board. Except they don't know that hammers exist. That does not make the wrench bad. It is more of using the wrong tool for the job.

exactly. that's why i thought, and still think, ppl using mastodon should know about the different approach, nomadic identity and security / privacy features. some do, some don't like it, but many have no idea. this has to be approached carefully, to avoid creating an us-against-them, my-way-or-the-highway reaction.

the developers already know and aren't happy to expand their vision, or so i've heard here and there. personally i didn't see anything in this regard, but i have been completely out of the whole fediverse thing for a long time.

couple weeks back i started with mastodon and like it -- for what i'm doing, looking around and leaving a note here & there, no matter who sees it or not, it's fine. now i'll get the HZ / streams part of things running properly again. my idea is to see how the two work together and try to show off advantages of zot6 when i get things figured out in detail.