As I said here, both the admin of the sending and receiving instances are able to view direct messages. If DMs are encrypted that’s no longer a concern, which is why in my comment starting this thread I said this news was good.

Direct messages aren’t intended to be public

Do you have a source you could share about admins only seeing the private messages of local users? That’s not my understanding.

Take a look at this post or this one . They say that the admins of both the sending and receiving instance could decide to read your direct messages.

Privacy isn’t just for illegal acts. (And plenty of laws are unjust) You’re right that for truly sensitive communication it’s better to choose a tool dedicated for that purpose. It can still be beneficial to add encrypted communication to direct messages.

Here’s one post about it. I’m not one for direct messaging on social media personally. And on centralized services it’s true that your direct messages can be seen by employees if they’re sufficiently motivated or by court order, hacks, that sort of thing. But on mastodon both the administrator of your instance and the admins of the instances of the people you’re messaging can see your direct messages. Since an instance can be set up quickly by just one person, there’s higher likelihood of access. That person may have no qualms about accessing private info, they may have insufficient resources for proper security, or to fight legal efforts to access information. A large company will in theory have more concern about reputational risk if it’s uncovered they’ve accessed private information than some individuals will. I know many people running instances take great pride and care in what they do, but that’s not always true.

This is great. I think one critique of the fediverse is the lack of privacy, so it’s a welcome development.

Andrew Callaghan isn’t conservative

Read “Nudge” by Richard Thaler. Choice architecture is a real thing that has impact on whether things we want to happen actually happen. It’s not because people aren’t smart enough.

Wow if its rumoured it must be true

Fuck these guys.

It’s also a really nice feeling to help someone jump a car, or help push a disabled car off the road. It’s this short(ish) and well defined opportunity to do good, without much gray area of “is this the best course of action” or “am I making an impact” you get with longer and more complex activism.

If the instance is in the same country, a government can much more effectively exercise leverage against some guy running a server than a publicly traded corporation with lawyers on retainer.

If it’s not the same country maybe easier just to ignore.

The best case in terms of privacy is just not collecting data. Something like mullvad vpn where they don’t keep the sort of records that governments ask for.

Unfortunately anti spam measures often involve collecting identifying information (like email addresses).

Like the European Union?

Sorry for a casual, what do you mean cap at 60hz?

I just use Firefox on Ubuntu, which fifteen years ago seemed like enough.

Which also doesn’t seem that casual, but this shit is too much to keep up with. Today my engineer dad was complaining about search engines having too many ads and I asked what he used, and he said besides Google on the one computer he uses Bing on the other.

I think chairs and tables are insufficiently different - people would end up using one as a substitute for the other. I think a more interesting question would be what if you were required to magically eliminate all perfectly level planes (tables, chairs, beds), or eliminate all slanted planes (ramps, screws, lazy boys)

The wizard is not a reasonable guy

The wizard who is forcing you to do this said you have to actually be playing, you can’t be in a manager or commentator type role

Do people currently get paid to play naked twister? Seems like more of a collegiate level sport

I think this might be the answer

Are we calling chess a sport? In that case why not magic the gathering or black jack

Are there any causes you’re interested in? Volunteering is a good way to meet people. Having some kind of structured activity besides “making friends” and defined start/end times can be helpful to take pressure off.

Thanks for sharing. Although I’m an enthusiastic open source user, I haven’t written any code of significance, so I’m not aware: has anyone made a license where use is restricted to individuals and democratically controlled organizations? I’m picturing that would allow for some degree of profit motive while encouraging things like worker co-ops and excluding venture capital controlled entities.