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by Eric_WVGG 16 days ago
This is what the Bluesky “AT Protocol” is meant to solve, though I fear it might be a bit too late.
1 comments

Except AT Protocol can't do the very thing that made Facebook the commons: privacy.

There's a proposal to add privacy to the protocol (private posts, private groups), but I don't think anyone has solved the real root problem with trying to implement privacy in a federated system (as opposed to P2P), which is the bad administrator problem. The proposal I saw still relied on trustworthy app administrators to respect a post's privacy settings. And that's a huge flaw.

Friendica and Diaspora both have the same problem, and to my knowledge don't have a good solution for it. They both just sort of hand wave it away.

I'm waiting to see if someone comes up with a good solution for the unsafe admin problem, but so far I haven't seen one.

For privacy you should be using Matrix private chat with E2EE, no? So maybe we just need to add channels like in Telegram to Matrix?
Privacy works fine in Fediverse. The admins of both servers can read your messages, but you should expect that. Fediverse is email with gratuitous JSON and HTTP.

ATProto is trying to implement privacy on top of global public pub/sub which just obviously doesn't work.