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1. silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-Jun-2023 04:12:59 JST silverpill

   ActivityPub for Interoperable Messaging

   https://bifurcation.github.io/mimi-aim/draft-barnes-mimi-aim.html

   In the past I thought that it would be better to use a separate protocol like Matrix for private messaging, but I've changed my mind.

   Encrypted messaging needs to be seamlessly integrated into clients. And our implementation should be based on upcoming secure messaging standards MLS/MIMI

   • Jeff Martin (cuchaz@gladtech.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-Jun-2023 06:31:57 JST Jeff Martin

     in reply to

     @silverpill fascinating stuff! I never imagined anyone would seriously consider AP to be suitable for private messaging. I mean, sure, you could force a bunch of ciphertexts and keys in there for the actual content, but you'd still be leaking so much metadata. I think you'd need a much different protocol if you want to actually protect metadata along with the content itself. Especially if you wanted to protect the social graphs too.

     AP was fundamentally designed to be public. I feel like trying to shoehorn privacy in there after-the-fact is just asking for trouble.

   • silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-Jun-2023 06:31:57 JST silverpill

     in reply to

     • Jeff Martin

     @cuchaz Didn't you work on adding encrypted DMs to Mastodon?

     In most cases metadata protection is not needed, people just want to hide their DMs from server admins. Jumping between protocols is bad UX, we need encryption to be implemented natively.
     Those who need strong privacy, of course, should use different tools (that offer metadata protection).