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FBI Seizure of Mastodon Server is a Wakeup Call to Fediverse Users and Hosts to Protect their Users (www.eff.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

And people say what instance you choose doesn't matter. Wild that the choice often seems to be between giving your info to mega corps or trusting a random person who's servers could be raided at any moment for entirely unrelated reasons.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Given what we've learned about illegal and secret government surveillance from whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, I wouldn't trust a megacorp any more than "a random person".

The government already has the keys to all the megacorps' kingdoms. The only possible way to protect your data is to make sure it uses client-side encryption, and that those encryption keys never under any circumstances travel over the internet.

You should assume that any information you give to ANY site is readily available to all major world governments.

Keep your private messages on end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal or Matrix. Consider everything else public.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

or trusting a random person who's servers could be raided at any moment for entirely unrelated reasons.

IMO the end goal of a decentralized network should be to have a large number of small servers. Any raid/takedown should only affect a small subset of users.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right but the instance I'm on could get taken over by an asshole, and get defederated by, or defederates from, my favourite subs. Then I've got to abandon that account and start a whole new one, same as I did leaving Reddit. I'm really not sold on this model until I can transfer my account somehow.

[–] Joph 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I believe Mastodon has a "transfer accounts" feature. I don't know if Lemmy and Kbin do though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's tricky to implement though. Unfortunately ActivityPub didn't really consider account transfers as part of the initial protocol design.

It's something Bluesky is doing better, since they designed their system to be able to handle transfers from day 1, as a core part of the protocol. (it's going to become federated, eventually, but using their own protocol instead of ActivityPub).