Nothing on lemmy is private. Your instance is just hosted on a server, and in this instance that server is essentially just someone elses computer. Anything you do or say on the server can be viewed by the admin and whoever they decide to delegate access to.
This is true for practically every online service ever.
This is true for practically every online service ever.
Sorry i have to correct this statement. Unless all encryption can be broken one day (which is a different discussion), end-to-end encryption can be seen as private … if both parties can trust each other to keep it so.
One can see if a service/app does e2ee if they (best) ask you to enter your public key (and only that) which will be shared to others to enable them to encrypt messages to you (such PMs can only get decrypted with your private key which is stored nowhere but on your own devices), and verify signatures done using your privkey. In the second-best case, an application will generate a key pair on your device and instruct you to store away the private key it just generated somewhere safe and protected by a long passphrase because if you lose it your PMs can not be recovered.
Interestingly, the ActivityPub protocol and IIRC also the Lemmy database have a “public key” field which could be used for e2ee purposes but the functionality is just not implemented.
What?
Wait until you hear about the people hosting your email
Haha, love the image. I think everyone feels that way the first time they learn it.
End to end encrypt emails whenever you can too. Now, getting those you communicate with to implement and utilize pgp? That’s a whole other battle.
Nothing on lemmy is private. Your instance is just hosted on a server, and in this instance that server is essentially just someone elses computer. Anything you do or say on the server can be viewed by the admin and whoever they decide to delegate access to.
This is true for practically every online service ever.
Sorry i have to correct this statement. Unless all encryption can be broken one day (which is a different discussion), end-to-end encryption can be seen as private … if both parties can trust each other to keep it so.
One can see if a service/app does e2ee if they (best) ask you to enter your public key (and only that) which will be shared to others to enable them to encrypt messages to you (such PMs can only get decrypted with your private key which is stored nowhere but on your own devices), and verify signatures done using your privkey. In the second-best case, an application will generate a key pair on your device and instruct you to store away the private key it just generated somewhere safe and protected by a long passphrase because if you lose it your PMs can not be recovered.
Interestingly, the ActivityPub protocol and IIRC also the Lemmy database have a “public key” field which could be used for e2ee purposes but the functionality is just not implemented.
the admin of your Instance has full access to your account as they have full access to the database that holds your dms
Yeah, really it would be surprising to me if this wasn’t the case.