Social Networking Software Category

[jonah (Jonah Aragon)]

I mean ultimately, as we just saw today, (The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans) there is not much that can actually be done about that problem from a technical perspective

The issue you are describing is not limited to Mastodon or even social media inherently. The absolute best case scenario for the tools we recommend in any category is that: it is possible to use them privately.

This may sound like a cop-out to some but in reality tools that are possible to use privately are already a massive, massive step up from tools that are impossible to use privately, which is most tools out there.

Hoping for a tool that can only be used privately is kind of a pipe dream and out of scope because at a certain level it stops becoming a technical problem and starts becoming a social problem. All we can really do is make sure it isn’t a technical problem.

[GorujoCY]

agreed, if I was to say host my own matrix server for my family and limit to only that then, you can imagine how cool this is.
It’s only a matter of what you do imho.

[win11.shading291]

I was going to say that using any tool with a social aspect is compromised by default, but when I think about it, that would also apply to stuff like messenger app (Signal), emails, etc. Because even on 1-1 conversations, there are risks.

So, my take might have been too extreme actually

[Prismatic]

Not in this post but since added to the PR:

• Must support modern web application security standards/features (including multifactor authentication).

This is already covered by the general criteria.

Also note that Mastodon qualifies for a frontend due to requiring JavaScript.

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@jonah

Let’s say I self-hosted a Mastodon server, federated with absolutely nobody, limited all posts to followers only, and only gave accounts to my family. Is this not a very private social networking setup for my family?

If you define social networking to exclusively refer to social media & their UX, maybe true. But you can achieve the same (again, trading UX for security/privacy) using group chats and stories and the like in instant messengers.

@jonah

Is the harm of privately using social media in your life significantly greater than the harm of, say, scrapbooking or journaling? The medium doesn’t seem to matter as much to privacy as just who you share the content with.

But the medium influences who you (are forced to, or voluntarily) share the content with. Social media is not E2EE ^[1], being accessible to the service provider and anyone they voluntarily, involuntarily, or unknowingly allow access ^[2].

@jonah

I am not sure being a private person is equivalent to being an anti-social person

I agree! After all, here I am commenting . But the more social you are, the more parties you have to trust with your information - it’s not either private or not, it’s gradual.

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1. or does not require preexisting knowledge of a notebook and physical access to it ↩︎

2. More speculative as there could very well be guardrails to prevent this, but to explain what I mean a couple examples respectively: staff abusing access to stalk users; law enforcement requests; data breaches or bugs in the visibility controls. ↩︎