I’ve just recently moved to Lemmy, and so far I’m enjoying it quite a bit. However, I’ve been thinking about the privacy issues whe DMing someone here.

Since this is a federated service, when you DM someone you have to trust both your server’s admin, as well as the recipient’s. Not that I particularly trusted reddit, but at least it was 1 corporation with (hopefully) some solid security procedures in place, and potential penalties for data breaches. Whereas in Lemmy, it might just be 2 random guys.

I’ve added an age key to my profile, in the hopes to make people aware of this issue. As well as giving them an option, if they wish to contact me privately.

I know, it’s not user friendly. But it’s the only way I could think of that wouldn’t rely on email + GPG. Does anyone know of a better solution?

EDIT: I also realise that not having signing capabilities might be an issue… So maybe reverting back to good ol’ GPG is a better option?

  • SpacePirate@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Honestly, seems like Lemmy could be a pretty good implementation of asymmetric PKI as well, the instance could easily host your public key as part of your profile, and only the user would have the private key.

    There’d be some vulnerability around key issuance and recovery, but with a good official app, most users would just store the private key in the Keychain or Android Keystore, and would never bother with exporting the keys.