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RFC for Private Communities in Lemmy
(github.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Given that the admin of any instance with a single approved follower can see the contents of the community, this idea feels like placebo privacy. The false sense of privacy could be counterproductive.
The only way I can think to federate with something resembling true privacy would be to use PGP or similar. Encrypt the data with the user's private key, send it to and store it on remote instances encrypted ,and decrypted in JS on the user's computer. That would require users to mange private keys which they would no doubt lose, and be a lot of work for a pretty niche feature.
And then a user copy-pastes all the content onto pastebin or something lol
I guess the more important part might be only allowing posts/comments/votes from actually approved users, this should be good enough for that purpose
Anything more than that just use a local-only private community
Or maybe let's name the feature restricted community or something similar, instead of private community, to not make that fake sense of privacy
I think this would likely be the simplest solution and is worth considering especially since similar concerns have been raised with Mastodon over their naming of messaging specific people ("private"/direct/mentioned only/etc.).
Exclusive may be another good term instead of private.
I like it. can you make a pull request?
I can think of alternatives. For example, the server could keep the user's private key, encrypted with a passphrase that the user must have. So key loss wouldn't be an issue. (Yes, passphrase loss might, but there are lots of ways to keep those safely already, compared to key material which is difficult to handle.)