For US citizens:

10 days until November 3. Have you already voted?

(If you voted in person, let's say that's "delivered".)

Share if interested, etc.

#uspol #midterms #voting #VoteEarly #antifascism

Regarding Musk openly threatening Congressional Democrats who try to investigate him:

Isn't it highly illegal to threaten elected officials?

#corruption #musk #congress #extortion

Picolita, this evening. Her #Caturday debut.

The rumors are true-- the reason RightsCon in Zambia was cancelled was because of China pressuring the Zambian government to disallow Taiwanese participants and possibly other "sensitive" topics. This is of course unacceptable for perhaps the most important human rights conference in the world.

The Chinese government is not benign, in case anyone has any doubt, and with the fall of the US their global influence is growing and they are emboldened to wield it. (My theory is that China is keeping the rest of us at war in order to come out on top later.)

Full details:

https://www.rightscon.org/rc26-statement/

#RightsCon #RightsCon2026 #HumanRights #FreeSpeech #FreeExpression #Zambia #China #Taiwan

There are something like 10 Democratic candidates. Porter and Steyer are the top two in polling, and I added Becerra just because I've seen more discussion of him than the other lower-polling candidates. (If Mastodon allowed enough poll options, I would have included all of them.)

California voters only:

Now that Eric Swalwell is out, who will you vote for in the primary for governor?

Boost if interested, etc.

#California #GovernorRace #elections #uspol #KatiePorter #TomSteyer #XavierBecerra

When you listen to music, do you mostly listen to:

(Check all that apply. Share if interested, etc.)

#music

10) FURTHER INFO

To get FriendSafe app:
- Android users: https://friendsafe.net/friendsafe-android.apk
- iPhone users: contact me to get on beta list

Currently running PGMP servers:
- wss://friendsafe.net/fs-go
- wss://friendsafe.net/fs

james@jmarshall.com
@jamesmarshall@ sfba.social

9) NEXT STEPS

- Everything here could be improved if there is interest
- Needs more themes
- Needs some UX expertise and a security review
- Other delivery protocols could be plugged in if they support this API:
send_message(msg, recipient_list)
- Currently uses Google Firebase for push notifications, but could move to Unified Push
- Currently sends posts to all friends, but could add support for flexible recipient lists
- Again, I would love to see other tools add these features instead of creating yet another social media system

8) ANONYMOUS* REPLIES TO POSTS

- Can reply “anonymously” to a friend’s post
- OP still sees who you are, but no one else does

7) PRIVATE POSTING MEANS EASIER MODERATION!

- The only people a user interacts with are their friends and their FoF
- Presumably, the friend in the middle could mediate conflicts by warning/blocking abusers, etc.

6) REPLY CONTROLS, POTENTIALLY

- All replies to a post are sent back through OP’s device, allowing full reply controls

- This is also a weakness, due to the lack of good background process support in iOS and Android: reply delivery is delayed until OP is connected to server

- Problem could be mitigated by allowing a trusted always-on device to forward replies to recipients

5) *** VERY FLEXIBLE THEME SUPPORT ***

- Themes include HTML template sets for full layout support!
- UX designers can create themes, users can download/share them
- Current theme uses side-by-side post layout, but another theme could do e.g. infinite scroll if wanted
- Would auto-check all templates for security
- Could standardize template data fields on e.g. property names from schema.org

4b) (cont'd) E2EE AND (SOME) METADATA PROTECTION IN FRIENDSAFE

- Current e2ee could be improved by adding ratchets to PGMP, both hop-by-hop and end-to-end

4) E2EE AND (SOME) METADATA PROTECTION IN FRIENDSAFE

- Uses custom protocol, working title: Private Group Message Protocol (PGMP)

- PGMP is fairly simple and is documented

- Metadata protection is critical for hiding your social graph; this is important for e.g. activists who want to protect their contacts

- I would much rather use an existing protocol, but none existed yet to do this (I asked around)

- Metadata protection comes from onion-like routing, but uses one-to-many asynchronous messages rather than one-to-one synchronous connections (like Tor)

- Efficient delivery-- only need to upload encrypted message once to send to many recipients

- Metadata protection is imperfect! Metadata is still visible if attacker controls all servers along the delivery path (think large state-sponsored attacks), or potentially from traffic fingerprinting; this could be improved by adding more servers and longer delivery paths, plus random padding/delays/etc. to mitigate fingerprinting

3) FEATURES UNIQUE (?) TO FRIENDSAFE AMONG FEDERATED SOCIAL MEDIA SYSTEMS

- E2ee and (some) metadata protection to allow use of untrusted servers
- Very flexible theme support, allowing third-party themes and full layout control
- Reply controls, potentially
- “Anonymous” replies (still seen by original poster)
- Long-press emoji to magnify-- every app should have this!
- Tracks read vs. unread posts and replies, can view e.g. only unread posts, or only posts with unread replies

2) LIMITS OF EXISTING PRIVATE-POSTING SOLUTIONS

- Friendica, Hubzilla: closest, but limited mobile support, limited e2ee
- ActivityPub: no e2ee yet, no reply controls, very public*
- Veilid, SimpleX: possibly, but not much development yet
- Matrix: more chat than posting, no reply controls, no metadata protection

Please tell me if I missed any!

*E2ee in ActivityPub has recently been roughly specified, uses MLS, ready for implementors

1) SECURE, FEDERATED PRIVATE POSTING WITH FRIENDSAFE

Q: Why yet another federated system?!

A: None exist with needed privacy features, alas:

- Posting to friends only, à la FB
- E2ee with (some) metadata protection
- Full mobile support
- Reply controls

So, I dusted off this project from a few years ago.

*** Note that I would much rather another more fully-developed project add these features, but I haven’t seen any with them.

🧵

The world needs a secure, open source alternative to Facebook private posting (i.e. to friends only), but nothing on the fediverse really fills the need today, alas. At the Fediforum in June, I gave a short presentation on FriendSafe, a social media system I've written that supports private posting. It's a proof of concept that works today, but it would need major UX work and a security review before it's really ready for widespread use. It has a few other features I haven't seen in other social media yet, and which I'd love to see added to other projects.

In this thread is that 10-slide presentation, one slide per post. The text in the slides is the same as the text in the posts. The presentation is focused on FriendSafe, but I'm also just trying to get these ideas out there.

Let's start a conversation. Specifically, how can we move forward to get secure private posting ASAP, with full mobile support, etc.? I think this is critical to let people exit FB.

@fediforum

#fediforum #SocialMedia #privacy