Gregory's ServerIf you went the e2e route in the current ecosystem you'd have some kind of Signal-style lock-in where you'd need people running the same client on both ends, but you'd be bouncing around encrypted messages via activitypub, I guess? idk. just spitballin here people
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 @darius Mastodon actually used to have API endpoints for E2EE messaging https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820 which has been dropped due to the lack of clients: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/14283. It maybe worthwhile looking into the code for how it looked like. (I'm afraid I'm not an expert :P  But also, in response to all the "what about e2e encryption" -- I would like that but I would *also* like a nice dedicated user interface for my activitypub DMs as they exist today. Would a custom client be more secure than my current DMs? no. would it be LESS secure? also no!  Further (and now I am ranting, sorry), I used email as an analogy specifically because it is insecure as shit but we use it every day I probably should have pitched it in the original post as an idea for insecure messaging @darius Yeah. I’m in favor of a better UX. I’m even more in favor of fixing the glaring safety hole before encouraging new adoption. I’m a thoughtful server admin, but even I don’t trust me with your DMs. (And yes, I totally had the “I read your emails” sticker back in the day.)   @darius i'm not sure what the point of such a *server* would be, but as a *client*, i imagine it would make some sense. i'm thinking generic activitypub server and then an activitypub client that just shows you your inbox. i mean, everything is a "direct message" on the spec level, right? just, you're dealing indirectly with resources. perhaps you could have a separate Message activity, but it is also conceivable to add certain objects to a certain collection. maybe even both of these ideas.  @darius FWIW email is a lot more secure, on average, than people give it credit for. It doesn't break in the nice clean way that e.g. spoofed TLS would, but in practice if you try to blast out plaintext SMTP forged from: headers these days, you get blackholed into oblivion 99% of the time. servers are also using TLS between each other and so grabbing messages off the wire is not trivial either. @glyph right, and ActivityPub has similar protections built in for forged from fields and the like. The core insecurity of "Google can hand your plaintext email to the cops" is analogous to "admins can read your DMs" that people on here are always bringing up
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 @darius XMPP has a pretty decent end to end 2 entity chat system. XMPP has a pretty rich system for creating gateways and there's some thoughts about trying to build an ActiivityPub / XMPP gateway. https://nlnet.nl/project/Libervia/ Though beats me how all the keys would get moved around the different protocols. @darius There is e2e encryption for open/federated protocols. XMPP has PGP, OTR and OMEMO, Matrix has Olm/Megaolm, Email has PGP, IRC has (had?) FiSH, probably more stuff that I forget. All these protocols allow you to use all kinds of clients and they are able to talk to each other with e2e encryption. |
@darius heh i think we’re agreeing, yes