My understanding is that the anonymous profile thing won’t really
work. That’s as far as
ActivityPub is concerned - one
of the protocols behind Lemmy, Mastodon et al.
Every person/bot/whatever which comments, posts, upvotes;
any social “activity” must have an independently verifiable public
identity (via WebFinger).
Here are some example identities:
When some “activity” is performed by that identity,
a message is delivered to many (many!) servers.
They could be running anything but we commonly see Mastodon, Lemmy,
Meta’s Threads (soon?).
Each server can really do whatever it wants with that message. For example:
There’s no way to make a profile private because there isn’t really a profile to begin with.
What we really have is just the activity received from @[email protected].
The whole thing feels a lot more like email than popular social networking sites
when you get down to the nuts and bolts.
Old-school mailing lists archives also offer a way to search for posts by author.
e.g. Richard Miller
I still think the idea of casual privacy applies. There may be no way to hide all my activity, but there’s no need to give everyone one a sortable, searchable profile page one click away either.
I agree. ActivityPub messages are not necessarily public information; implementations like Mastodon and Lemmy just assume it - and there’s nothing stopping the services relaying the messages elsewhere afterwards.
Actually in my fiddling with ActivityPub I’ve made some posts and comments to a Lemmy instance which were not relayed to other instances, even though they would have been if I made them using Lemmy. So there’s definitely opportunity for systems to implement features inbetween “totally public” and “single recipient”.
My understanding is that the anonymous profile thing won’t really work. That’s as far as ActivityPub is concerned - one of the protocols behind Lemmy, Mastodon et al.
Every person/bot/whatever which comments, posts, upvotes; any social “activity” must have an independently verifiable public identity (via WebFinger). Here are some example identities:
When some “activity” is performed by that identity, a message is delivered to many (many!) servers. They could be running anything but we commonly see Mastodon, Lemmy, Meta’s Threads (soon?).
Each server can really do whatever it wants with that message. For example:
Coming back to the OP:
Here is some service’s idea of what @[email protected] is:
There’s no way to make a profile private because there isn’t really a profile to begin with. What we really have is just the activity received from @[email protected]. The whole thing feels a lot more like email than popular social networking sites when you get down to the nuts and bolts.
Old-school mailing lists archives also offer a way to search for posts by author. e.g. Richard Miller
I still think the idea of casual privacy applies. There may be no way to hide all my activity, but there’s no need to give everyone one a sortable, searchable profile page one click away either.
I agree. ActivityPub messages are not necessarily public information; implementations like Mastodon and Lemmy just assume it - and there’s nothing stopping the services relaying the messages elsewhere afterwards.
Actually in my fiddling with ActivityPub I’ve made some posts and comments to a Lemmy instance which were not relayed to other instances, even though they would have been if I made them using Lemmy. So there’s definitely opportunity for systems to implement features inbetween “totally public” and “single recipient”.