When I asked about #e2ee on #ActivityPub, I'd meant for social media posts, not for direct messages.
It sounds like that is a harder problem?
@dynamic
Yes. The social media meant to be public by design, even if it is some "followers-only' declared visibility, as an account can have thousands of followers or more.
Imagine if Fediverse News account have 9000 followers, and it publish public posts, meant displayed in feeds on other servers (like `Followed Hashtags` ).
Social media, even at ActivityPub and messenger are totally different spaces and use cases.
This feels a lot like saying that the reason why I can't put things up on the internet for a couple dozen close friends to read is because it'd be hard to implement the same thing for a news syndicate. Surely there's a middle ground somewhere.
@dynamic @koteisaev Each of us has several hundred followers, which is not infeasible but already an order of magnitude more than a couple dozen.
I'm not clear on whether ActivityPub supports the idea of posting to subgroups of followers, but Mastodon certainly doesn't, so this would be another feature entirely. I suppose if that were in place, you could say "E2EE only works with small groups" but it's not very satisfying.
@varx @dynamic @koteisaev Isn't E2EE just dependent upon the receiver having a key, so there is practically no server involvement? Maybe receiver identification or message acceptance is the issue? Maybe I should go RTFM.
I guess what I'm saying is a message could show up that looks like garbage to those without a key.
@lwriemen
In fact there was a brief interval when Facebook was still using XMPP/Jabber and I was able to use Facebook messenger to send e2ee messages using Pidgin's "OTR" encryption. You can also still use Pidgin do that on Discord, I confirmed. But it relies on having someone on the other end who's set up with the right kind of client, which is nearly impossible to scale up, for social reasons.