This is excellent news. And I'm very excited about FASPs. I just spoke to James Smith on Sunday on my podcast, Works On My Machine Live, about his 3D printing Fediverse project Manyfold and he's working on supporting FASPs. I didn't understand them at first, but James explained it so easily. Such incredible work happening everywhere!
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This is great. I think one critique of the fediverse is the lack of privacy, so it's a welcome development.
I think one critique of the fediverse is the lack of privacy
What? By whom? How?
E: why am I being downvoted for asking a question?
Well, I mean, there is a lack of privacy. That's kind of how the platform exists architecturally. I just don't find that to be a problem, per se. It's a social platform, which makes sense to me for everything on the protocol to be "open" to one degree or another. Not everything has to be securitymaxxed.
I agree with you. It's a social platform. Most people might think it's a nice feature, but I don't think E2EE is an urge.
What lack of privacy are you referring to?
The fact that everything you write, upload or otherwise do (boost, upvote, downvote, etc.) is never private in any way or at any point, on any platform using the ActivityPub protocol, including Mastodon, along with every other platform or service that's a part of the Fediverse, such as Lemmy or Piefed. Everything is out in the open, able to be seen by third parties.
This is by design, and it's what enables federation to take place between a multitude of servers aka. instances. So it's a trade off.
But properly implemented encryption could help to mitigate this to some degree. I think think most things won't meaningfully benefit from being encrypted, since most things on these platforms are meant to be publicly visible in the first place - such as this conversation you and I are having now. But it would certainly be nice to be able to have direct messages that are also for sure private messages. And I can imagine a couple of other things where encryption could also be meaningfully applied, to some extent.
Private messages are completely private, you as normal user can never see someone elses private message. The only ones who can theoretically read private messages from other users are instance admins. Exactly the same on Reddit or Twitter by the way. But if any admin actually does that, people would quickly spread the word and leave that instance.
End-to-end encryption does add some extra security in that admins also cannot read other users private messages. I dont think that people really send very sensitive information through Lemmy private messages, it is better to use an actual messenger application for that.
I don't think you can claim there's a "lack of privacy" when things that are intended to be public...are made public.
Direct messages aren't intended to be public
...they aren't public.
Here's one post about it. I'm not one for direct messaging on social media personally. And on centralized services it's true that your direct messages can be seen by employees if they're sufficiently motivated or by court order, hacks, that sort of thing. But on mastodon both the administrator of your instance and the admins of the instances of the people you're messaging can see your direct messages. Since an instance can be set up quickly by just one person, there's higher likelihood of access. That person may have no qualms about accessing private info, they may have insufficient resources for proper security, or to fight legal efforts to access information. A large company will in theory have more concern about reputational risk if it's uncovered they've accessed private information than some individuals will. I know many people running instances take great pride and care in what they do, but that's not always true.
Setting an instance is easy, but actually getting a significant amount of users is much more difficult. And as admin you can only see the private messages of your local users, no one else. So if you are not talking about illegal stuff the risk is negligible. And if you are, use a real messenger application or better yet avoid all computers.
Do you have a source you could share about admins only seeing the private messages of local users? That's not my understanding.
Take a look at this post or this one . They say that the admins of both the sending and receiving instance could decide to read your direct messages.
Privacy isn't just for illegal acts. (And plenty of laws are unjust) You're right that for truly sensitive communication it's better to choose a tool dedicated for that purpose. It can still be beneficial to add encrypted communication to direct messages.
Yes that is what I mean, admins can only see private messages that their own local users are either sending or receiving. Not from users on other instances.
I agree that privacy is important, but most admins probably couldnt care less what their users are writing in private messages. And there is a tradeoff between implementing end-to-end encryption, or implementing other features that may be more important.
That's pretty cool but they're also going to be subjecting themselves to a very high level of scrutiny.
thats my band name!
I use a separate (free) email account just for Mastadon and Lemmy. I'm always using a VPN to connect and carefully limit identifiable info.
I didn't read any mention of the Public Key Directory server approach/proposal (c.f. https://soatok.blog/2025/12/15/announcing-key-transparency-fediverse/) in the post nor the two pages it links to. I think overall E2EE is important for messages, full stop, but I do hope that it won't be as user - opaque as Signal and WhatsApp nor as rough of a user experience as how matrix was when I used it back in 2019.
We will implement a new Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider (FASP) that will allow sharing storage and media processing between servers.
This is pretty big too, as the cost and legal risks of hosting this user content is high. They've clearly thought about the media moderation problems too:
We will build a reference implementation of a Automated Content Detection service, again as a new Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider with an open protocol.
This will allow server owners to opt-in to use external tools to scan content for spam, illegal materials, etc in order to help them fight bad actors; they could self-host these tools if they choose to do so, or share the infrastructure with other servers for better efficiency.
It reads like they're basically making an alternative to picts-rs, or am I missing some key difference?
Isn't picts-rs just something that runs on one server and just handles converting and resizing images? The new remote media storage stuff could run that, but the point is to allow more centralised servers so not every instance needs to individually store, process and transmit media.
Not just media, things like searching the Fediverse can be handled by a dedicated server, shared (or not) by multiple servers. Also spam detection, link preview generation, etc.
Who finances the Sovereign Tech Agency?
The Sovereign Tech Agency is financed by the German Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation and is a subsidiary of SPRIND, the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation.
https://www.sovereign.tech/faq#who-finances-the-sovereign-tech-agency
Clients need to make it more obvious which are private messages. Some only display a tiny icon, adding fear and uncertainty as to whether you’re replying to a public post or a private message.
The planned things are huge! Amazing stuff ahead. This FASP things begins to make sense to me.
Shared remote storage, shared blocklists, Auto content detection/deletion and e2ee messages!
This addresses some really difficult and long-standing problems and I really look forward to seeing the result.
I've had my eye on FIRES for some time and this funding will take it from fringe niche thing to the big time.

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