Jason Reusch wrote:
> I have to agree with Evan (from a previous post on
> | groups) that this is perhaps not consistent with an open
> | communication platform like Laconica.
>
> If private communication is inconsistent with the platform, why allow direct 
> messages?  Why should a group have any less privacy than a user?
>   
Perhaps I should clarify my position on this.

I sympathize with those people who say that everything should be out in
the open. But I don't feel like it's my decision to make, for those
folks who do want to have control over who reads what they're doing.

The problem I have with privacy is implementation. First, there's the
problem of federation. If you post a private notice on my server, and I
pass it to another server for a subscriber there, and that server on
purpose or by accident leaks your private notice (or uses it for
nefarious purposes), that's a real problem. To be fair, we accept this
risk pretty normally in using email, but I'm still concerned about it.

Second, there's the problem of local leakage. We just have so many
places that notices appear: on your user page, on other people's
'personal' tabs, on rss feeds, on search, on tag clouds, out through the
public XMPP feed -- all over the place. Just missing one of those
outlets -- even in some weird edge case -- would mean that a notice you
thought was private gets released to the public.

DMs aren't like this, in two ways. First, we don't yet send DMs across
OMB -- it's just not supported by the 0.1 protocol. Second, we store
them completely separately (different table) and there's not much chance
they'll get mixed in with notices.

All of which is to say: not enough people seem to really want private
notices for me to my all my brainpower into making it happen. This will
probably not be the case with groups; a lot of people seem to want
privacy there. All of which is to say: I'm not excited about it.

-Evan

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