Casual privacy is blinds in my window at night so passer-byes can't see in - and casually invade my privacy.
What casual privacy isn't, is a foolproof cage around my data...
There’s a lot of value for online communities in pseudonymous reputation.
If somebody writes something that I’m tempted to respond to, but I think might be a troll, I can look at their profile and make a much better decision. If I’m a moderator and I need to decide between a warning and a ban, a look at their profile often tells me whether a warning will be productive. If I’m thinking about doing some kind of trade or transaction, I can see if they have a reputation to lose by cheating me.
Fortunately, it’s easy to have multiple pseudonymous accounts on something like Lemmy if you don’t want those identities overlapping.
My understanding is that the anonymous profile thing won’t really
work. That’s as far as
ActivityPub is concerned - one
of the protocols behind Lemmy, Mastodon et al.
Every person/bot/whatever which comments, posts, upvotes;
any social “activity” must have an independently verifiable public
identity (via WebFinger).
Here are some example identities:
When some “activity” is performed by that identity,
a message is delivered to many (many!) servers.
They could be running anything but we commonly see Mastodon, Lemmy,
Meta’s Threads (soon?).
Each server can really do whatever it wants with that message. For example:
I posted this photo from a Mastodon instance (via @otl@hachyderm.io)
There’s no way to make a profile private because there isn’t really a profile to begin with.
What we really have is just the activity received from @otl@hachyderm.io.
The whole thing feels a lot more like email than popular social networking sites
when you get down to the nuts and bolts.
Old-school mailing lists archives also offer a way to search for posts by author.
e.g. Richard Miller
I still think the idea of casual privacy applies. There may be no way to hide all my activity, but there’s no need to give everyone one a sortable, searchable profile page one click away either.
I agree. ActivityPub messages are not necessarily public information; implementations like Mastodon and Lemmy just assume it - and there’s nothing stopping the services relaying the messages elsewhere afterwards.
Actually in my fiddling with ActivityPub I’ve made some posts and comments to a Lemmy instance which were not relayed to other instances, even though they would have been if I made them using Lemmy. So there’s definitely opportunity for systems to implement features inbetween “totally public” and “single recipient”.
Cool idea, but I’d also worry that anonymous profiles would make Lemmy feel like 4chan.
Sometimes just having a public profile (even behind a made up username) is enough to make people act more courteous.
There’s a lot of value for online communities in pseudonymous reputation.
If somebody writes something that I’m tempted to respond to, but I think might be a troll, I can look at their profile and make a much better decision. If I’m a moderator and I need to decide between a warning and a ban, a look at their profile often tells me whether a warning will be productive. If I’m thinking about doing some kind of trade or transaction, I can see if they have a reputation to lose by cheating me.
Fortunately, it’s easy to have multiple pseudonymous accounts on something like Lemmy if you don’t want those identities overlapping.
My understanding is that the anonymous profile thing won’t really work. That’s as far as ActivityPub is concerned - one of the protocols behind Lemmy, Mastodon et al.
Every person/bot/whatever which comments, posts, upvotes; any social “activity” must have an independently verifiable public identity (via WebFinger). Here are some example identities:
When some “activity” is performed by that identity, a message is delivered to many (many!) servers. They could be running anything but we commonly see Mastodon, Lemmy, Meta’s Threads (soon?).
Each server can really do whatever it wants with that message. For example:
Coming back to the OP:
Here is some service’s idea of what @otl@hachyderm.io is:
There’s no way to make a profile private because there isn’t really a profile to begin with. What we really have is just the activity received from @otl@hachyderm.io. The whole thing feels a lot more like email than popular social networking sites when you get down to the nuts and bolts.
Old-school mailing lists archives also offer a way to search for posts by author. e.g. Richard Miller
I still think the idea of casual privacy applies. There may be no way to hide all my activity, but there’s no need to give everyone one a sortable, searchable profile page one click away either.
I agree. ActivityPub messages are not necessarily public information; implementations like Mastodon and Lemmy just assume it - and there’s nothing stopping the services relaying the messages elsewhere afterwards.
Actually in my fiddling with ActivityPub I’ve made some posts and comments to a Lemmy instance which were not relayed to other instances, even though they would have been if I made them using Lemmy. So there’s definitely opportunity for systems to implement features inbetween “totally public” and “single recipient”.