#mastondon Friends!
Technical Discussion
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in 2026, gabe is absolutely right. a few years ago, i would've been the first one debating this position... but it's 2026.
@gabek @scottjenson“It’s 2026” is about to be the final boss of product design:
Dev: Should we do this feature?
Me: It’s 2026, what do you think?
Dev: Say no more… -
@knapjack
How can the sender validate the public key hasn't been tampered with by the instance or server admin?It is a hard problem. There are solutions but it will be complicated.
For sure. Mainly I'm thinking about "Pretty Good Obfuscation" than a good solution. Something better than in the clear.
Really, delivery isn't guaranteed, so there are already potential issues about tampering that encryption won't necessarily fix, just maybe make abusing it harder.
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#mastondon Friends!
There is a TON of improvements we could make to Private Mentions (often called DMs on other platforms) e.g.
* getting them out of the public timeline
* Having a stronger notification tied to the Private Mention tab
* (amount other things)But here is my MAIN question: How critical is it that these message are encrypted? I'm not against encryption! It's just complex and will take time. If we were to make some UX changes as a first pass WITHOUT encryption would you be OK with that (at least for now?)
If you MUST have encryption, that's fine, please do me the favor of replying explaining why you need it.
@scottjenson I would love to see UX improvements. Make it clear the limitations of "Private" Mentions. Make it hard to send a PM publicly. Users are misusing PMs now. The UX doesn't help the user. It would be nice to help them as soon as possible.
E2E would be fantastic, but encryption is going to take a while. And like another reply wrote: I'm not convinced it is possible on a federated system given email and xmpp still have only bad solutions to encrypted messaging.
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#mastondon Friends!
There is a TON of improvements we could make to Private Mentions (often called DMs on other platforms) e.g.
* getting them out of the public timeline
* Having a stronger notification tied to the Private Mention tab
* (amount other things)But here is my MAIN question: How critical is it that these message are encrypted? I'm not against encryption! It's just complex and will take time. If we were to make some UX changes as a first pass WITHOUT encryption would you be OK with that (at least for now?)
If you MUST have encryption, that's fine, please do me the favor of replying explaining why you need it.
@scottjenson without encryption, what is the point of calling it a "private mention" ?
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@knapjack
How can the sender validate the public key hasn't been tampered with by the instance or server admin?It is a hard problem. There are solutions but it will be complicated.
#TedUnangst seems to be off the Fediverse (and maybe the web) but linking this here for posterity: https://github.com/timkuijsten/honk/blob/fork/encrypt.go
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Is the FEP public? I’ll love to check it out!
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@evan @scottjenson
But if you forget to set it to PM, there are no stripes, which should be a jarring visual clue.I suppose adding a second compose button would make you choose sooner, but ultimately you have to always click on the right buttons in the right order.
They could change the default when you are viewing your PM list. That would make sense.
This is what I meant that there are lots of things to look at here. As Evan points out, let's make PMs actually something distinct and clearly not a message. Too many people either think something is a PM and it isn't or it is, and it shows up in your feed which makes people panic!
So many simple things to clean up here.
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@scottjenson not at all critical.
Hint: you could re-run this as a poll, for the question.
@grahamperrin Oh I plan to! But it helps to have a conversation first so I know WHAT to put into the poll...
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@scottjenson Hey Scott! I'm so glad you're tackling this issue. I have lots of trouble with DMs on Mastodon. I think you're addressing, these, but here goes:
The biggest one is how easily they're confused with regular messages. I routinely mess this up, and make private messages public, or vice versa.
The next is how hard it is to visualize threads - especially in the existing notification section. I often lose my place in complex discussions
@benpate Could not agree with you more! Do you have any ideas on how to improve threads? Any products that do it well for example? Branching threads are a bit like merging PRs, the dependency tree can get crazy complex!
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@scottjenson encryption that still works if one of the parties changes fediverse servers seems like it maybe technically challenging
I also would note that a lot of my interactions on the Fediverse are not very “microblogging” focused. Ie this response isn’t a blog post.
I largely use DMs here for private but non sensitive content (like “hey your url is broken” or “you have a typo on that post”
@Rycaut Exactly. My hypothese is that most PMs are scoping outisde of the public discourse and are not in need to encryption. This doesn't mean it's not a good long term goal! Just saying lots of usage does not require it
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@scottjenson I must request encryption, because even though I don't need it right now. ...
A - you never know when you might need it
B- if I did, I might feel really uncomfortable telling you the reason, so I'm gonna assume that I'm piping up for some of those folks.@morst No one is saying encryption is off the table. Just that I wanted to start with low hanging fruit (bucause the improvements are so much easier. Others are working on the encryption (it's a VERY hard problem)
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@morst No one is saying encryption is off the table. Just that I wanted to start with low hanging fruit (bucause the improvements are so much easier. Others are working on the encryption (it's a VERY hard problem)
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@Rycaut Exactly. My hypothese is that most PMs are scoping outisde of the public discourse and are not in need to encryption. This doesn't mean it's not a good long term goal! Just saying lots of usage does not require it
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@benpate Could not agree with you more! Do you have any ideas on how to improve threads? Any products that do it well for example? Branching threads are a bit like merging PRs, the dependency tree can get crazy complex!
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@grahamperrin Oh I plan to! But it helps to have a conversation first so I know WHAT to put into the poll...
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This is what I meant that there are lots of things to look at here. As Evan points out, let's make PMs actually something distinct and clearly not a message. Too many people either think something is a PM and it isn't or it is, and it shows up in your feed which makes people panic!
So many simple things to clean up here.
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I think it's discussed here:
https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/12/19/implementing-encrypted-messaging-over-activitypub/
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#TedUnangst seems to be off the Fediverse (and maybe the web) but linking this here for posterity: https://github.com/timkuijsten/honk/blob/fork/encrypt.go
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@scottjenson without encryption, what is the point of calling it a "private mention" ?
