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Glad to see more people dip toes into federated networks. Instance owners can read DMs. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 https://github.com/mas

Glad to see more people dip toes into federated networks. Instance owners can read DMs. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079

DocTomoe 4y ago
Also, instance owners can unilaterally control what you see and who may follow you (by blocking individual users and whole servers from federating with theirs). Whether or not such a block exists is transparent to you as a user (this is different from earlier, similar approaches, like NNTP-Servers, where it was pretty clear when a particular group was not being distributed by your server - also, differently from Mastodon, NNTP did not represent your identity identifier - using different servers for different groups was perfectly usable with the same identity (which came down to your email address). They sell this as a feature and celebrate when "undesirable" servers get blocked. Mastodon is a good idea turned bad by building in pretty dystopian functionality.
- guipsp 4y ago
  No thanks, I don't want illegal stuff on my feed
  - lrvick 4y ago
    Then do not follow people that post illegal stuff.
    - nkrisc 4y ago
      When I first created an account on some instance, I saw other people’s content even though I hadn’t followed anyone yet, so that advice seems insufficient.
      - lrvick 4y ago
        You can choose to look at instance wide content but that is a firehose of potentially illegal nonsense on any large server. You can stream illegal content from the firehose on Twitter too btw. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-users-are-exploiting-illegal-images-of-children-3693085.html https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-us... In general just following topics or people that interest you is a safer bet on any platform with user generated media.
    - systemicdanna 4y ago
      Content from all federated instances is added to the feed in your instance, so you personally don't need to follow illegal stuff for it to appear in your feed. This is actually the most off-putting feature of Mastodon for me.
      - drewzero1 4y ago
        Sure, on the federated feed; that one can be a bit of a free-for-all. Once you follow a good handful of people you can spend most of your time on the home feed and only see stuff from people you follow and the things they boost.
        systemicdanna 4y ago
        Have you ever tried to follow anyone from an instance that your instance refused to federate with? I am wondering how big of a problem this is. Not that I have encountered it, mostly just see this as potential a drawback of Mastodon's approach to federation.
        drewzero1 4y ago
        Good question! I hadn't tried, but just found a random user on an instance that mine doesn't federate with and clicked Follow. It took me through the remote follow and that user did appear on my list and showed up in searches when they didn't before. Unfortunately I seem to have chosen an abandoned or dormant account for my test, so I can't say for certain whether posts will show up in Home, but I would expect so given the other visibility changes. Hopefully someone else with some fedi experience can chime in.
        DocTomoe 4y ago
        Given how discovery in Mastodon works, by following "boosted" (think: re-tweeted) content creator or reading new people in a discussion, you wouldn't even know these accounts exist - sure, you can manually enter a mastodon id in the search bar to go directly to an account somewhere else (and thus try to access a potentially blocked node), but that's not the common use-case. Now, if that increases or decreases the problem space is a philosophical question. I personally do have issues with blocking instances as a whole because one admin disagrees with another admin on unrelated issues. If I get denied access to other people to organise around, e.g. building our own zen retreat because my admin and their admin disagree on political factions or because one admin nuked the connection to another instance for not being trigger-happy enough against their own users, everyone loses. Such technical possibilities and - in fact - recommendations run against the ideas of a civil society.
  - DoItToMe81 4y ago
    For all its faults, I've never exactly seen masses of greatly illegal content on Mastodon.
    - jrnichols 4y ago
      unfortunately I have. an instance was brigaded and flooded with very illegal content. and then the instance was taken down forever by authorities. all the instance users could do was try to flag everything they could but it was too much. edit: it was called sinblr and rumors are that it was an instance called pawoo that flooded it with seriously illegal content.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      An open question is whether this property will persist through growth.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  It's pretty easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. So if you don't like the policies of your current instance, there isn't anything keeping you there.
  - nickthegreek 4y ago
    Just the pain of actually figuring out its going on or atively monitoring, and the the non-zero hassle of finding, choosing and transferring to another instance. And then be prepared to do it all again. This is not stuff the average user wants to ever be bothered with.
    - moron4hire 4y ago
      But Mastodon instances do tell you what is going on. They provide lists of the other instances they have banned from their own, with a statement on why. Here's the one I'm on right now: https://mstdn.social/about https://mstdn.social/about (scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section). Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you. I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
      - eduction 4y ago
        > scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”. No thanks.
- mcv 4y ago
  Calling it dystopian is a bit harsh. Some degree of moderation is unavoidable or you end up with 4chan (actually, even 4chan had moderation, I think; it's just unavoidable). Ultimately of course you're supposed to choose a server that you like and trust. At least here you have that choice. On Twitter or Facebook you don't. Of course it should have had end to end encryption. It sounds like a massive omission. I found a discussion about adding that to ActivityPub[0] where someone points out that if you don't want server admins able to read messages, you can't store private keys on the server, which sounds to me like it would hurt usability. Makes you wonder how unbreakable the end-to-end encryption of other systems really is. I'm not enough of an encryption guru to say how big of a problem this really is. [0] https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225 https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225
- jackthetab 4y ago
  Then don't go to those servers. Isn't that what "freedom of association" is about? Also, is the functionality dystopian or the application thereof?
  - ok123456 4y ago
    That breaks the idea of having a federated network, if you have no guarantees that sending a message on one end of it reaches its recipient. Now we just have all the same problems of email but with the mechanics of a multicast medium. Eventually, you'll reach the point where a duopoly will effectively control who is allowed to be part of the larger network. And this was the original problem people were trying to solve by creating a federated network.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      > That breaks the idea of having a federated network What fresh nonsense is this? There's never been a federated system with anything like a perfect guarantee of connectivity to literally anything. There are always limits, both social and technical. Where do people get these ideas?
      - syntheweave 4y ago
        The argument is a case of begging the question: Start with your conclusion, then reason backwards to the justification. It's the case that a federation tends to erode. Likewise, it's the case that a centralized system tends to collapse. The question to ask is really one of backing a horse to ride on to be pragmatically useful; winning the technical argument is academic. The fediverse has a few core principles in mind, and they tend to get centered in Mastodon's marketing. So it does make some sense that it gets attacked for being an imperfect realization of those principles, and for being unprincipled in other respects. But in a head-to-head comparison with other implementations of social media it can still claim to be more principled on those things it tried to pursue.
      - ok123456 4y ago
        Having the inability to know if a message is propagated federation wide, based on an arbitrary value judgement based on ????, renders it useless as a communication medium. For this to work it needs to be treated as a common carrier, and not a social network.
cgranier 4y ago
I did not know this...
- zaik 4y ago
  If you are about to write a DM you will see this warning: Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- fazfq 4y ago
  What did you expect? Messages have to be stored on the server, and the instance owner has access to the server...
  - icelancer 4y ago
    Normal users do not understand what federation is, much less how messages are stored.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      This has nothing to do with federation. It's just a fact of life on any hosted internet service.
      - yarg 4y ago
        Not if end-to-end encryption is available.
        stormbrew 4y ago
        If you don't own the key exchange (and you don't, even on the services most people consider secure), you're still, on some level or another, just relying on trust that this is the case. At any rate, mastodon is a web app, not an IM client. No one who's ever raised this has even begun to explain how you could work e2e into something like it. Certainly no other microblogging platform has e2e anything, because that's not actually a thing that makes sense.
LeonB 4y ago
Same is true on Twitter, only you’re not earned about it.
- judge2020 4y ago
  But there's also less of a reason for anyone with permission to read DMs @ Twitter to do so, possibly with logging for any audits into unauthorized access. For mastodon, chances are your instance is focused around some general interest and thus getting on an admin's bad side could mean abusing their power to extract personal information/DMs from your account. The only real issue with this wrt Twitter is that such failure of their internal employee auth allows malicious attackers to access DMs as well: https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/22/twitter-admits-hackers-accessed-dms-of-dozens-of-high-profile-accounts/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/22/twitter-admits-hackers-acc...
  - ori_b 4y ago
    > But there's also less of a reason for anyone with permission to read DMs @ Twitter to do so, possibly with logging for any audits into unauthorized access. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extract-facebooks-engineers-spied-women/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extrac... I'd expect there to be many Facebookers who weren't caught, and I'd expect the same to be true of Twitter.
  - lrvick 4y ago
    Insider attacks happened at twitter. State actors love to read DMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    People pay employees and contractors at social media companies to delve into others' accounts and messages all of the time. Some of them do it on their own without any outside influence, as well.
criddell 4y ago
Is it possible for instance owners to impersonate people on their server?
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Yes (just like with email, or Twitter where the owner could impersonate anybody)
  - jefftk 4y ago
    It isn't really the same as email, because with the email it doesn't matter if you are on the same domain as other people. You can avoid this risk by hosting your own email but running your own Mastodon instance just for yourself wouldn't make much sense.
    - johannes1234321 4y ago
      My Mastodon instance can exchange messages with yours, similar to my mail server sending you messages to you. See ActivityPub protocol.
      - jefftk 4y ago
        Mastodon is federated, but by running an instance just for yourself you give up on per-instance culture
    - deadbunny 4y ago
      It's exactly the same as an email server. Whomever owns the server can send email from your address therefore impersonating you as per the original question.
      - jefftk 4y ago
        It's the same in that way, yes: both are federated protocols where you need to trust the owner of your server. But with Mastodon there are within-server interactions like the local timeline (https://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-may-be-using-mastodon-wrong.html https://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-may-be-using-mastodon-wrong....) that have no equivalent in email, so if you decide to try to avoid this risk by self-hosting you're giving up something that a lot of Mastodon users really enjoy.
jameshart 4y ago
Forget about what instance owners can do within the confines of the common Mastodon server codebase - Mastodon in the end is a protocol, so there are NO guarantees about the behavior of individual instances. It seems like Mastodon assumes that misbehaving nodes will be cut off and just ignored by well-behaved ones - but that assumes that abuse is detectable and that standards of behavior will be enforced even if it means cutting off potentially large communities.
- remram 4y ago
  Whatever your software, the person running it can read your messages. Unless you're using a non-web client that does E2EE, of which there are none right now.
  - LanternLight83 4y ago
    > a non-web client that does E2EE Yeah, I guess secure scuttlebutt comes to mind? But it's kinda it's own thing, notably with it's own scaling issues when it comes to widespread use.
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    Does mastodon even support E2EE? If you want encrypted chat rooms, isn't that what Matrix is for
    - remram 4y ago
      The server has the bits to do it [1], but clients need to implement it (they are the "ends" in "end-to-end encryption" after all). However this hasn't seen much interest from app developers and users. [1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820
  - Drblessing 4y ago
    > non-web client that does E2EE Signal?
    - 4y ago
pygy_ 4y ago
As can Twitter and Facebook employees
- systemicdanna 4y ago
  AFAIK if you access a user's private info at Facebook your employee's ID will be immediately flagged leading to very severe consequences (instant firing in most cases).
stormbrew 4y ago
> Instance owners can read DMs. "Admins of <website> can read data on <website>" is just a tautology. It's true of everything you use on the internet where you don't own the server, and even then it's dubious. If people don't get that about mastodon they probably don't get it about everything else they use either, so this recurring argument just seems like FUD... [note: Edited <service> to <website> above because people keep coming at this from the angle of chat clients that run on your phone, and we're talking about websites here - a website can't have "e2e" encryption because it is both ends. That said, some of y'all believe way too hard in the perfectness of e2e in general and I addressed that in some of my replies]
- vgel 4y ago
  yeah, but on twitter you're probably a nobody, the staff have no incentive to read your dms. on mastodon, you're at least a friend-of-a-friend of the operator unless you're on a huge instance.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    Others have pointed out that this is fallacious -- even on big services sometimes employees are creepy stalkers, sometimes they're malicious actors of other sorts -- but even if you ignore that on twitter you are a target of advertising and if you think they aren't slurping up all the data they can about you and storing it in a database somewhere, you're fooling yourself. Anyways, down this logic path is an internet where we somehow put all our trust in megacorporations and absolutely none in our fellow human beings and I dunno about you but one of those sounds a lot more dystopian to me than the other.
    - vgel 4y ago
      twitter has hundreds of millions of users and 7,000 (less now, unfortunately) employees, not all of which have production access. i don't know anyone at twitter, so them accessing my data would need to be a random choice from the whole userbase. they'd need to evade internal checks (which, however weak they are, are infinitely stronger than the average fediverse instance). could it happen? could i be eaten by an escaped zoo leopard during my morning walk? having my data "read" by a non-sentient advertising model, while irritating, is nowhere near the same as having it read by a human being. that is a false equivalence. i made no argument about the absolute merit of twitter vs the fediverse. this is simply a downside of small communities that people excitedly migrating to the fediverse with little understanding of how it works or experience with its predecessors will soon run into—twitter is neutral ground, on mastodon you might be arguing with the instance admin's friend and find yourself retaliated against. anyone who used a forum or IRC in the 90's/00's knows what i'm talking about.
SergeAx 4y ago
Twitter owner can read DMs to, with extra effort. So what?
ck2 4y ago
Pretty sure some google employees can read others gmail. I know yahoo employees read email, I got my account back once by telling them recent subject lines.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  In a sense, yes. Email contents in gmail are technically accessible to Google. But they are protected like hell via a bunch of dedicated systems that make it very difficult to access this material without an explicit auditable ticket associated with helping that user with some problem and permission to access their gmail contents. Attempts to circumvent this will get people fired. This does rely on you trusting Google to implement and use these systems. The question is whether you trust a major tech company or whatever Mastodon server owner more to not peek at your DMs.
sitta 4y ago
I really don't like that ActivityPub does not support encryption. I wanted to setup an instance of one of these platforms for friends and family to use, but hated the thought of having to tell them that, by the way I can read all of your messages. I wouldn't, but I hate that that's even possible. So, instead I'm trying to twist Matrix to work more like a social media platform. It's janky, but totally workable, so long as you're not looking for global engagement.

Glad to see more people dip toes into federated networks. Instance owners can read DMs. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079

DocTomoe 4y ago

Also, instance owners can unilaterally control what you see and who may follow you (by blocking individual users and whole servers from federating with theirs). Whether or not such a block exists is transparent to you as a user (this is different from earlier, similar approaches, like NNTP-Servers, where it was pretty clear when a particular group was not being distributed by your server - also, differently from Mastodon, NNTP did not represent your identity identifier - using different servers for different groups was perfectly usable with the same identity (which came down to your email address). They sell this as a feature and celebrate when "undesirable" servers get blocked. Mastodon is a good idea turned bad by building in pretty dystopian functionality.

guipsp 4y ago
No thanks, I don't want illegal stuff on my feed
- lrvick 4y ago
  Then do not follow people that post illegal stuff.
  - nkrisc 4y ago
    When I first created an account on some instance, I saw other people’s content even though I hadn’t followed anyone yet, so that advice seems insufficient.
    - lrvick 4y ago
      You can choose to look at instance wide content but that is a firehose of potentially illegal nonsense on any large server. You can stream illegal content from the firehose on Twitter too btw. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-users-are-exploiting-illegal-images-of-children-3693085.html https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-us... In general just following topics or people that interest you is a safer bet on any platform with user generated media.
  - systemicdanna 4y ago
    Content from all federated instances is added to the feed in your instance, so you personally don't need to follow illegal stuff for it to appear in your feed. This is actually the most off-putting feature of Mastodon for me.
    - drewzero1 4y ago
      Sure, on the federated feed; that one can be a bit of a free-for-all. Once you follow a good handful of people you can spend most of your time on the home feed and only see stuff from people you follow and the things they boost.
      - systemicdanna 4y ago
        Have you ever tried to follow anyone from an instance that your instance refused to federate with? I am wondering how big of a problem this is. Not that I have encountered it, mostly just see this as potential a drawback of Mastodon's approach to federation.
        drewzero1 4y ago
        Good question! I hadn't tried, but just found a random user on an instance that mine doesn't federate with and clicked Follow. It took me through the remote follow and that user did appear on my list and showed up in searches when they didn't before. Unfortunately I seem to have chosen an abandoned or dormant account for my test, so I can't say for certain whether posts will show up in Home, but I would expect so given the other visibility changes. Hopefully someone else with some fedi experience can chime in.
        DocTomoe 4y ago
        Given how discovery in Mastodon works, by following "boosted" (think: re-tweeted) content creator or reading new people in a discussion, you wouldn't even know these accounts exist - sure, you can manually enter a mastodon id in the search bar to go directly to an account somewhere else (and thus try to access a potentially blocked node), but that's not the common use-case. Now, if that increases or decreases the problem space is a philosophical question. I personally do have issues with blocking instances as a whole because one admin disagrees with another admin on unrelated issues. If I get denied access to other people to organise around, e.g. building our own zen retreat because my admin and their admin disagree on political factions or because one admin nuked the connection to another instance for not being trigger-happy enough against their own users, everyone loses. Such technical possibilities and - in fact - recommendations run against the ideas of a civil society.
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  For all its faults, I've never exactly seen masses of greatly illegal content on Mastodon.
  - jrnichols 4y ago
    unfortunately I have. an instance was brigaded and flooded with very illegal content. and then the instance was taken down forever by authorities. all the instance users could do was try to flag everything they could but it was too much. edit: it was called sinblr and rumors are that it was an instance called pawoo that flooded it with seriously illegal content.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    An open question is whether this property will persist through growth.
moron4hire 4y ago
It's pretty easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. So if you don't like the policies of your current instance, there isn't anything keeping you there.
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  Just the pain of actually figuring out its going on or atively monitoring, and the the non-zero hassle of finding, choosing and transferring to another instance. And then be prepared to do it all again. This is not stuff the average user wants to ever be bothered with.
  - moron4hire 4y ago
    But Mastodon instances do tell you what is going on. They provide lists of the other instances they have banned from their own, with a statement on why. Here's the one I'm on right now: https://mstdn.social/about https://mstdn.social/about (scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section). Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you. I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
    - eduction 4y ago
      > scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”. No thanks.
mcv 4y ago
Calling it dystopian is a bit harsh. Some degree of moderation is unavoidable or you end up with 4chan (actually, even 4chan had moderation, I think; it's just unavoidable). Ultimately of course you're supposed to choose a server that you like and trust. At least here you have that choice. On Twitter or Facebook you don't. Of course it should have had end to end encryption. It sounds like a massive omission. I found a discussion about adding that to ActivityPub[0] where someone points out that if you don't want server admins able to read messages, you can't store private keys on the server, which sounds to me like it would hurt usability. Makes you wonder how unbreakable the end-to-end encryption of other systems really is. I'm not enough of an encryption guru to say how big of a problem this really is. [0] https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225 https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225
jackthetab 4y ago
Then don't go to those servers. Isn't that what "freedom of association" is about? Also, is the functionality dystopian or the application thereof?
- ok123456 4y ago
  That breaks the idea of having a federated network, if you have no guarantees that sending a message on one end of it reaches its recipient. Now we just have all the same problems of email but with the mechanics of a multicast medium. Eventually, you'll reach the point where a duopoly will effectively control who is allowed to be part of the larger network. And this was the original problem people were trying to solve by creating a federated network.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    > That breaks the idea of having a federated network What fresh nonsense is this? There's never been a federated system with anything like a perfect guarantee of connectivity to literally anything. There are always limits, both social and technical. Where do people get these ideas?
    - syntheweave 4y ago
      The argument is a case of begging the question: Start with your conclusion, then reason backwards to the justification. It's the case that a federation tends to erode. Likewise, it's the case that a centralized system tends to collapse. The question to ask is really one of backing a horse to ride on to be pragmatically useful; winning the technical argument is academic. The fediverse has a few core principles in mind, and they tend to get centered in Mastodon's marketing. So it does make some sense that it gets attacked for being an imperfect realization of those principles, and for being unprincipled in other respects. But in a head-to-head comparison with other implementations of social media it can still claim to be more principled on those things it tried to pursue.
    - ok123456 4y ago
      Having the inability to know if a message is propagated federation wide, based on an arbitrary value judgement based on ????, renders it useless as a communication medium. For this to work it needs to be treated as a common carrier, and not a social network.

cgranier 4y ago

I did not know this...

zaik 4y ago
If you are about to write a DM you will see this warning: Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
fazfq 4y ago
What did you expect? Messages have to be stored on the server, and the instance owner has access to the server...
- icelancer 4y ago
  Normal users do not understand what federation is, much less how messages are stored.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    This has nothing to do with federation. It's just a fact of life on any hosted internet service.
    - yarg 4y ago
      Not if end-to-end encryption is available.
      - stormbrew 4y ago
        If you don't own the key exchange (and you don't, even on the services most people consider secure), you're still, on some level or another, just relying on trust that this is the case. At any rate, mastodon is a web app, not an IM client. No one who's ever raised this has even begun to explain how you could work e2e into something like it. Certainly no other microblogging platform has e2e anything, because that's not actually a thing that makes sense.

LeonB 4y ago

Same is true on Twitter, only you’re not earned about it.

judge2020 4y ago
But there's also less of a reason for anyone with permission to read DMs @ Twitter to do so, possibly with logging for any audits into unauthorized access. For mastodon, chances are your instance is focused around some general interest and thus getting on an admin's bad side could mean abusing their power to extract personal information/DMs from your account. The only real issue with this wrt Twitter is that such failure of their internal employee auth allows malicious attackers to access DMs as well: https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/22/twitter-admits-hackers-accessed-dms-of-dozens-of-high-profile-accounts/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/22/twitter-admits-hackers-acc...
- ori_b 4y ago
  > But there's also less of a reason for anyone with permission to read DMs @ Twitter to do so, possibly with logging for any audits into unauthorized access. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extract-facebooks-engineers-spied-women/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extrac... I'd expect there to be many Facebookers who weren't caught, and I'd expect the same to be true of Twitter.
- lrvick 4y ago
  Insider attacks happened at twitter. State actors love to read DMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  People pay employees and contractors at social media companies to delve into others' accounts and messages all of the time. Some of them do it on their own without any outside influence, as well.

criddell 4y ago

Is it possible for instance owners to impersonate people on their server?

johannes1234321 4y ago
Yes (just like with email, or Twitter where the owner could impersonate anybody)
- jefftk 4y ago
  It isn't really the same as email, because with the email it doesn't matter if you are on the same domain as other people. You can avoid this risk by hosting your own email but running your own Mastodon instance just for yourself wouldn't make much sense.
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    My Mastodon instance can exchange messages with yours, similar to my mail server sending you messages to you. See ActivityPub protocol.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      Mastodon is federated, but by running an instance just for yourself you give up on per-instance culture
  - deadbunny 4y ago
    It's exactly the same as an email server. Whomever owns the server can send email from your address therefore impersonating you as per the original question.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      It's the same in that way, yes: both are federated protocols where you need to trust the owner of your server. But with Mastodon there are within-server interactions like the local timeline (https://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-may-be-using-mastodon-wrong.html https://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-may-be-using-mastodon-wrong....) that have no equivalent in email, so if you decide to try to avoid this risk by self-hosting you're giving up something that a lot of Mastodon users really enjoy.

jameshart 4y ago

Forget about what instance owners can do within the confines of the common Mastodon server codebase - Mastodon in the end is a protocol, so there are NO guarantees about the behavior of individual instances. It seems like Mastodon assumes that misbehaving nodes will be cut off and just ignored by well-behaved ones - but that assumes that abuse is detectable and that standards of behavior will be enforced even if it means cutting off potentially large communities.

remram 4y ago
Whatever your software, the person running it can read your messages. Unless you're using a non-web client that does E2EE, of which there are none right now.
- LanternLight83 4y ago
  > a non-web client that does E2EE Yeah, I guess secure scuttlebutt comes to mind? But it's kinda it's own thing, notably with it's own scaling issues when it comes to widespread use.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  Does mastodon even support E2EE? If you want encrypted chat rooms, isn't that what Matrix is for
  - remram 4y ago
    The server has the bits to do it [1], but clients need to implement it (they are the "ends" in "end-to-end encryption" after all). However this hasn't seen much interest from app developers and users. [1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820
- Drblessing 4y ago
  > non-web client that does E2EE Signal?
  - 4y ago

pygy_ 4y ago

As can Twitter and Facebook employees

systemicdanna 4y ago
AFAIK if you access a user's private info at Facebook your employee's ID will be immediately flagged leading to very severe consequences (instant firing in most cases).

stormbrew 4y ago

> Instance owners can read DMs. "Admins of <website> can read data on <website>" is just a tautology. It's true of everything you use on the internet where you don't own the server, and even then it's dubious. If people don't get that about mastodon they probably don't get it about everything else they use either, so this recurring argument just seems like FUD... [note: Edited <service> to <website> above because people keep coming at this from the angle of chat clients that run on your phone, and we're talking about websites here - a website can't have "e2e" encryption because it is both ends. That said, some of y'all believe way too hard in the perfectness of e2e in general and I addressed that in some of my replies]

vgel 4y ago
yeah, but on twitter you're probably a nobody, the staff have no incentive to read your dms. on mastodon, you're at least a friend-of-a-friend of the operator unless you're on a huge instance.
- stormbrew 4y ago
  Others have pointed out that this is fallacious -- even on big services sometimes employees are creepy stalkers, sometimes they're malicious actors of other sorts -- but even if you ignore that on twitter you are a target of advertising and if you think they aren't slurping up all the data they can about you and storing it in a database somewhere, you're fooling yourself. Anyways, down this logic path is an internet where we somehow put all our trust in megacorporations and absolutely none in our fellow human beings and I dunno about you but one of those sounds a lot more dystopian to me than the other.
  - vgel 4y ago
    twitter has hundreds of millions of users and 7,000 (less now, unfortunately) employees, not all of which have production access. i don't know anyone at twitter, so them accessing my data would need to be a random choice from the whole userbase. they'd need to evade internal checks (which, however weak they are, are infinitely stronger than the average fediverse instance). could it happen? could i be eaten by an escaped zoo leopard during my morning walk? having my data "read" by a non-sentient advertising model, while irritating, is nowhere near the same as having it read by a human being. that is a false equivalence. i made no argument about the absolute merit of twitter vs the fediverse. this is simply a downside of small communities that people excitedly migrating to the fediverse with little understanding of how it works or experience with its predecessors will soon run into—twitter is neutral ground, on mastodon you might be arguing with the instance admin's friend and find yourself retaliated against. anyone who used a forum or IRC in the 90's/00's knows what i'm talking about.

SergeAx 4y ago

Twitter owner can read DMs to, with extra effort. So what?

ck2 4y ago

Pretty sure some google employees can read others gmail. I know yahoo employees read email, I got my account back once by telling them recent subject lines.

UncleMeat 4y ago
In a sense, yes. Email contents in gmail are technically accessible to Google. But they are protected like hell via a bunch of dedicated systems that make it very difficult to access this material without an explicit auditable ticket associated with helping that user with some problem and permission to access their gmail contents. Attempts to circumvent this will get people fired. This does rely on you trusting Google to implement and use these systems. The question is whether you trust a major tech company or whatever Mastodon server owner more to not peek at your DMs.

sitta 4y ago

I really don't like that ActivityPub does not support encryption. I wanted to setup an instance of one of these platforms for friends and family to use, but hated the thought of having to tell them that, by the way I can read all of your messages. I wouldn't, but I hate that that's even possible. So, instead I'm trying to twist Matrix to work more like a social media platform. It's janky, but totally workable, so long as you're not looking for global engagement.