What do we need to change about how we operate, now that the political environment is darkening?

The overall goals would be to safeguard user identities, ensure communication privacy, and protect against censorship and state surveillance.

User Anonymity and Privacy

  • End-to-end encryption: Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data
  • Anonymous accounts: Allow users to create accounts without requiring personally identifiable information (PII), such as email or phone numbers. How can we balance this with the need to combat spam?
  • Tor and VPN Integration: Ensure compatibility with privacy tools like Tor, and provide guidance on using VPNs.

Data Storage

  • Remove or minimize data collection, including IP addresses, geolocation, and device information. No web server logs.
  • Ephemeral content: auto-deleting posts, messages, etc after a set period.
  • Instance chooser that flags which instances are in unsafe countries.
  • Defederate from instances in unsafe countries?

Communities

  • Private communities - currently all are public
  • Communities where every post is encrypted
  • Approval process to join some communities
  • Better opsec around instance owners, admins and moderators

What else?

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    9·
    8 hours ago

    Ugh, the comments here…

    I think these are some good ideas, but e2ee in a browser that depends on server supplied javascript will never be really safe.

    I think you would be better off making a nice XMPP integration so that people can use existing native apps with good e2ee for their private messages.

    Otherwise the ideas are sensible and worth a shot, looking forward to what you come up with in Piefed 😊