A controversial developer circumvented one of Mastodon's primary tools for blocking bad actors, all so that his servers could connect to Threads.

Authorized Fetch (also referred to as Secure Mode in Mastodon) was recently circumvented by a stupidly easy solution: just sign your fetch requests with some other domain name.

  • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    11 months ago

    We, by which I mean some loose group of people who want decentralized tools to thrive should also be building things for secure, private communication, and we are. Matrix, for example offers strongly end-to-end encrypted federated chat rooms and private messages. It also has a kind of rough UX and, IIRC resource-intensive server software. We should work toward improving that.

    I’m not advocating against privacy at all. I want people to understand as clearly as possible that Mastodon, Lemmy, and anything that works like them isn’t private and can’t be private when part of an open federated network so they can decide whether that’s a good fit for how they’re using it. The block evasion described in the link is just run a server on a domain that isn’t blocked, and I imagine any other mitigations bolted onto Mastodon that don’t break open federation will be little better.

    • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      tools to thrive should also be building things for secure, private communication.

      Sure, but this should not be seen on the same class of software of “social media” or even “the web”.

    • ttmrichter@lemmy.worldEnglish
      42·
      11 months ago

      Matrix […] has a kind of rough UX and, IIRC resource-intensive server software. We should work toward improving that.

      Except that I get the vibes from the Matrix community that the shit UX is part of the attraction because it does a wonderful job of gatekeeping.

      I don’t hold out much hope for Matrix working out ever, but perhaps someday someone will use it as inspiration for making something that doesn’t suck.

      • ChaosAD@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        10 months ago

        Matrix is the protocol. You can have whatever client you like. There are mobile apps that are similar to discord and connect to matrix servers.