As I said here, both the admin of the sending and receiving instances are able to view direct messages. If DMs are encrypted that’s no longer a concern, which is why in my comment starting this thread I said this news was good.

Direct messages aren’t intended to be public

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.

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.

This is great. I think one critique of the fediverse is the lack of privacy, so it’s a welcome development.

Besides the other commenter highlighting the specific nature of the linked study, I will say I’m generally doing technical queries where if the answer is wrong, it’s apparent because the AI suggestion doesn’t work. Think “how do I change this setting” or “what’s wrong with the syntax in this line of code”. If I try the AI’s advice and it doesn’t work, then I ask again or try something else.

I would be more concerned about subjects where I don’t have any domain knowledge whatsoever, and not working on a specific application of knowledge, because then it could be a long while before I realize the response was wrong.

Could you try to understand what I’m saying instead of jumping down my throat?

If I want to turn off a certain type of notification in a program I’m using, I don’t need to sift through three forum threads to learn how to do that. I’m fine taking the AI route and don’t think I’ve lost my humanity.

Lots of legitimate concerns and issues with AI, but if you’re going to criticize someone saying they used it you should at least understand how it works so your criticism is applicable.

It is useful. Chatgpt performs web searches, then summarizes the results in a way customized to what you asked it. It skips the step where you have to sift through a bunch of results and determine “is this what I was looking for?” and “how does this apply to my specific context?”

Of course it can and does still get things wrong. It’s crazy to market it as a new electronic god. But it’s not random, and it’s right the majority of the time.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. It’s everywhere. The U.S. left Afghanistan and was replaced by a different centralized entity. One could argue how decentralized those “tribes” were, but regardless, after the U.S. departure they recreated a similar structure.

Complexity comes hand in hand with size. The OP is a chart of the different email providers. Can an individual run their own email server? Yes. And doesn’t it get more difficult after a certain number of users and require hiring specialists? Yes. But still, such large services exist, and a majority of users turn to them.

If the fediverse lives there will always be small servers, but we can expect to see really big ones. If we don’t want them to be corporate recreations of gmail and yahoo and hotmail I’d argue we should figure out a platform co-op/worker co-op model, including the necessary funding and specialists.

My argument isn’t about the fediverse specifically. It’s that centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and the lack of friction resulting from centralization can make it more competitive.

What is the reason the cost per user of hosting a Lemmy server goes up after a few thousand users? If it were say, you need more expensive hardware, that doesn’t necessarily disprove my argument. Just because a bigger investment is needed doesn’t mean it’s not cheaper per user or not more competitive. Just that you or I don’t have the capital, or that we might see centralization bad because we have bad experiences with centralized entities.

Also just because something is more competitive doesn’t mean it’s morally or aesthetically more desirable. The specialized army fed and trained by an empire overruns the brave and happy tribe of hunter gatherers.

What I’m saying is since we know the phenomenon of centralization occurs, we should try to subvert it as much as possible by introducing democratic structures.

We should have large semi-centralized services. But they should be democratically controlled.

Do you ever think about why cities form? Rural life has a lot of appealing characteristics, plus it’s the starting state of the world. Cities form because there is an advantage to size, proximity and specialization. If we had a new planet and completely evenly distributed the population across its land, we’d very quickly form cities regardless.

It’s the same with centralized services. It takes a lot of special knowledge and equipment to run an email service. The average Lemmy user may have those resources, but even here, how many of us run our own email servers?

It costs less per person in resources to add more users after the first one. So there’s an incentive to aggregate users together. And once you have a certain number of users, maybe you figure out some way to fund your operation, and you can pay more people to add features/capabilities. Soon your entity not only has more users, it’s more appealing than a plan vanilla email service, and you get even more users. You’re doing it cheaper and better than the DIYers.

I think centralization and size are naturally occurring. We should think about ways to exist and benefit from them, so something like Gmail but run as a worker cooperative.

If you run your own server (like a country would in this case) you’re the one deciding whether things are allowed to be posted. Of course that doesn’t stop other people from blocking you. But the whole idea is as a sovereign country a private corporation shouldn’t have a say over which posts are seen.

Just like there’s no such thing as an unbiased person, there’s no unbiased instance. Better to know what you’re getting into than to assume what you’re reading isn’t coming from a particular point of view.

Ok so was it an issue or not? You seem to be saying both

From the article they said smaller unattended instances were the primary target. So you might not have been one of the instances targeted, and if you don’t have open registration and/or have captcha on then it wouldn’t be an issue either.

It’s big for sales people too - I research who is the right person to contact at an organization, and also to find out what they’ve been up to lately that might be useful in a sales pitch.

Well you know, “quantity has a quality all its own”