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This idea that you create privacy by leaving the search feature out of the software is silly. Yes, to some extent security through obscurity does work, and tryi

This idea that you create privacy by leaving the search feature out of the software is silly. Yes, to some extent security through obscurity does work, and trying to maintain an anti-sharing culture might reduce the spread of your information. But is that really what you want to rely on? The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). In both cases, you're crippling the software to add an illusory safeguard, which doesn't actually stop bad actors from having access to your posts and hence the ability to record and rebroadcast them. You know who got the system right? Facebook. Private by default, but the user can decide exactly who can see each of their digital objects. It's easy to define groups of friends, allow sharing to friends-of-friends, one person, the whole world, whatever. The concept of friends (bilateral agreement to share information) makes way more sense than this "follow" thing. I want my open-source, federated, Facebook already. Edit: Although, I did just have a flashback to when Facebook announced Graph Search... which lasted about a week until searches that actually worked were deemed creepy and they backpedaled into the stone age. It's so frustrating how these technologies succeed or fail based on fashion rather than technical merit.

NikolaNovak 4y ago
Interestingly, I find Facebook friend groups a complete dark pattern ever since the days of Google plus. G+ circle were super easy to create, maintain, split, divide, merge, manipulate, and - and this was brilliant - share. FB groups by comparison seem hidden, obfuscated and unmaintainable. Creating a new list or updating an old one is a complete pain with poor screen usage, poor or non existent gestures, control, actions, searches, let alone regexes etc. They exist... But it feels FB has gone out of its way to hide and obfuscate them. Is my experience weird?
- Groxx 4y ago
  FB is very clearly deeply invested in convincing people to over-share by accident or habit, yeah. It makes their network more addictive, and they know it, so they press that button as hard as possible while building things that technically satisfy niches. --- I quite liked G+'s focus on choosing your audience. Because you have sub-groups even within small, tightly-knit friend groups; when you raise that number into the hundreds it's only more true, not less. It was a mostly-effective UX for embracing that, and it led to my feed being dramatically more relevant. Mastodon is filling a similar purpose for me, lately. The server you join has a pretty powerful impact on your local timeline - join a couple, use them as targeted sharing / browsing groups, and it's working much better for me than any algorithmic sorting ever did.
  - invig 4y ago
    G+'s implementation kind of broke communities though? Each individual having their own personal view of their circles meant that you couldn't reliably know which of your friends had seen the stuff your reading. That makes it really hard to talk about (Hey did you see X?, no what's X? Oh... oops?). I like the theory of being able to organise my relationships into nice little buckets, but that's absolutely not how social things work.
    - Groxx 4y ago
      Somewhat, yeah. Personally I'd like to let people define their own publishing "topics" and let people select which ones they want to follow.[1] "Did you see X" is largely killed by algorithmic feeds though IMO, which makes it somewhat irrelevant for any full-scale heavily-used network. Facebook is a prime example - important updates frequently are not seen by many close friends, because Facebook chose to not show them. Assuming nobody knows anything specific has kinda become the norm, sadly. [1]: Obviously many will not, but that's fine. By following them you just get an unfiltered stream. But many of my friends couldn't care less about what programming language of the week I'm looking at (because they're not techy), or what nearby events I'm going to (because they're 1000 miles away) and I'm very much the sort of person who will categorize that for them so they aren't flooded with things they won't be able to join in on. Hashtags are kinda like a crappy in-band version of this, and I have yet to see a system embrace them for this purpose. They're basically always for public purposes, which is part of why you need to use a million near-identical ones to actually get good coverage.
      - foobarbecue 4y ago
        +1 for topics. Conceptually, pub sub. Maybe also give publisher to have the ability to choose an access policy for their topics (anybody can join, exclude some, only requests I accept).
    - NikolaNovak 4y ago
      Circles were trivially shareable though. It made it super easy to create... Well, circles of friends :). These are the 15 of us into computers, 12 of us into photography, 6 of us into dnd, whatever. And then the best feature of all, Sharing of curated circles. A kind of competitive marketplace of topic related circles emerged so you could find these amazing circles of photographers or musicians etc. Best of all you ingested and then owned that (instance of) circle.
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  I agree, G+ system was more explicit, and I preferred it. FB has done the usual modern thing of hiding features so that the less technical users don't worry about them. Perhaps cowardly; I think even someone struggling with tech (parents, grandparents..) would have learned G+ if it really took off.
- neuronexmachina 4y ago
  What Fediverse projects have something analogous to G+ Circles? Based on some quick searching, the only one I could find is Bonfire's "Boundaries": https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/introducing_boundaries/ https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/introducing_boundaries/ > Within bonfire, you now have the possibility to define circles and boundaries: a way to privately group some of your contacts and then grant them permissions to interact with you and each piece of content you share at the most granular level. >Boundaries go beyond the typical permissions on social media (i.e. who can see your content) and include a long list of verbs in order to represent all kinds of meaningful interactions and collaboration that should be possible on a real social network.
invig 4y ago
You can't really make that either though. Facebook itself can see everything. As soon as you federate that all the admins can see everything and nothing is private. You could try and encrypt it down to the user level but a person added to a group would only see the content added from that point forward (the ability to decrypt would be defined at the time of the post, and new people could never read it). The only way around that would be centralised key management which defeats the whole point. This is one of those problems where it's probably better to just use Facebook.
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  Oh. Good point about the admins. I somehow missed that.
  - donkeyd 4y ago
    Just look at the 'Twitter Files'. It's not great that Elon can access anyone's private messages. It's a great tool to blackmail people.
- LamaOfRuin 4y ago
  I believe that option 2, where it relies on individual encryption at the cost of reading history, is how matrix does it (or can do it if chosen).
- neodymiumphish 4y ago
  Actually, I don't think this is right. The creator of a group or "shared to group Y" chat/posts can generate a shared key for use within that limited friend group. Their individual posts would be encrypted validated by their own private key, but all posts among the group would also be encrypted against the group chat. Struggle here would be that anyone who gets the shared key would have access to view and potentially add to the group.
  - mrtesthah 4y ago
    Signal's encrypted group chat management was recently made more robust and may be instructive: https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/
pavon 4y ago
> The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). That one addresses a real threat-model - someone who was your friend and whom you trusted at the time you sent the post, but has since turned against you. That is quite common among teens, which is the main demographic these social networks are targeting. Rather than them having a permanent record of all your online interactions since you met including embarrassing photographs, it just becomes he-said-she-said like it has been for ages, unless they were actively subverting the program to archive content while you were still friends, which is rare.
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  Fair point.
- tonypace 4y ago
  It's not that rare, but releasing a ton of this kind of screenshot makes you look very untrustworthy.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

NikolaNovak 4y ago

Interestingly, I find Facebook friend groups a complete dark pattern ever since the days of Google plus. G+ circle were super easy to create, maintain, split, divide, merge, manipulate, and - and this was brilliant - share. FB groups by comparison seem hidden, obfuscated and unmaintainable. Creating a new list or updating an old one is a complete pain with poor screen usage, poor or non existent gestures, control, actions, searches, let alone regexes etc. They exist... But it feels FB has gone out of its way to hide and obfuscate them. Is my experience weird?

Groxx 4y ago
FB is very clearly deeply invested in convincing people to over-share by accident or habit, yeah. It makes their network more addictive, and they know it, so they press that button as hard as possible while building things that technically satisfy niches. --- I quite liked G+'s focus on choosing your audience. Because you have sub-groups even within small, tightly-knit friend groups; when you raise that number into the hundreds it's only more true, not less. It was a mostly-effective UX for embracing that, and it led to my feed being dramatically more relevant. Mastodon is filling a similar purpose for me, lately. The server you join has a pretty powerful impact on your local timeline - join a couple, use them as targeted sharing / browsing groups, and it's working much better for me than any algorithmic sorting ever did.
- invig 4y ago
  G+'s implementation kind of broke communities though? Each individual having their own personal view of their circles meant that you couldn't reliably know which of your friends had seen the stuff your reading. That makes it really hard to talk about (Hey did you see X?, no what's X? Oh... oops?). I like the theory of being able to organise my relationships into nice little buckets, but that's absolutely not how social things work.
  - Groxx 4y ago
    Somewhat, yeah. Personally I'd like to let people define their own publishing "topics" and let people select which ones they want to follow.[1] "Did you see X" is largely killed by algorithmic feeds though IMO, which makes it somewhat irrelevant for any full-scale heavily-used network. Facebook is a prime example - important updates frequently are not seen by many close friends, because Facebook chose to not show them. Assuming nobody knows anything specific has kinda become the norm, sadly. [1]: Obviously many will not, but that's fine. By following them you just get an unfiltered stream. But many of my friends couldn't care less about what programming language of the week I'm looking at (because they're not techy), or what nearby events I'm going to (because they're 1000 miles away) and I'm very much the sort of person who will categorize that for them so they aren't flooded with things they won't be able to join in on. Hashtags are kinda like a crappy in-band version of this, and I have yet to see a system embrace them for this purpose. They're basically always for public purposes, which is part of why you need to use a million near-identical ones to actually get good coverage.
    - foobarbecue 4y ago
      +1 for topics. Conceptually, pub sub. Maybe also give publisher to have the ability to choose an access policy for their topics (anybody can join, exclude some, only requests I accept).
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    Circles were trivially shareable though. It made it super easy to create... Well, circles of friends :). These are the 15 of us into computers, 12 of us into photography, 6 of us into dnd, whatever. And then the best feature of all, Sharing of curated circles. A kind of competitive marketplace of topic related circles emerged so you could find these amazing circles of photographers or musicians etc. Best of all you ingested and then owned that (instance of) circle.
foobarbecue 4y ago
I agree, G+ system was more explicit, and I preferred it. FB has done the usual modern thing of hiding features so that the less technical users don't worry about them. Perhaps cowardly; I think even someone struggling with tech (parents, grandparents..) would have learned G+ if it really took off.
neuronexmachina 4y ago
What Fediverse projects have something analogous to G+ Circles? Based on some quick searching, the only one I could find is Bonfire's "Boundaries": https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/introducing_boundaries/ https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/introducing_boundaries/ > Within bonfire, you now have the possibility to define circles and boundaries: a way to privately group some of your contacts and then grant them permissions to interact with you and each piece of content you share at the most granular level. >Boundaries go beyond the typical permissions on social media (i.e. who can see your content) and include a long list of verbs in order to represent all kinds of meaningful interactions and collaboration that should be possible on a real social network.

invig 4y ago

You can't really make that either though. Facebook itself can see everything. As soon as you federate that all the admins can see everything and nothing is private. You could try and encrypt it down to the user level but a person added to a group would only see the content added from that point forward (the ability to decrypt would be defined at the time of the post, and new people could never read it). The only way around that would be centralised key management which defeats the whole point. This is one of those problems where it's probably better to just use Facebook.

foobarbecue 4y ago
Oh. Good point about the admins. I somehow missed that.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  Just look at the 'Twitter Files'. It's not great that Elon can access anyone's private messages. It's a great tool to blackmail people.
LamaOfRuin 4y ago
I believe that option 2, where it relies on individual encryption at the cost of reading history, is how matrix does it (or can do it if chosen).
neodymiumphish 4y ago
Actually, I don't think this is right. The creator of a group or "shared to group Y" chat/posts can generate a shared key for use within that limited friend group. Their individual posts would be encrypted validated by their own private key, but all posts among the group would also be encrypted against the group chat. Struggle here would be that anyone who gets the shared key would have access to view and potentially add to the group.
- mrtesthah 4y ago
  Signal's encrypted group chat management was recently made more robust and may be instructive: https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/

pavon 4y ago

> The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). That one addresses a real threat-model - someone who was your friend and whom you trusted at the time you sent the post, but has since turned against you. That is quite common among teens, which is the main demographic these social networks are targeting. Rather than them having a permanent record of all your online interactions since you met including embarrassing photographs, it just becomes he-said-she-said like it has been for ages, unless they were actively subverting the program to archive content while you were still friends, which is rare.

foobarbecue 4y ago
Fair point.
tonypace 4y ago
It's not that rare, but releasing a ton of this kind of screenshot makes you look very untrustworthy.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]