this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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Things could be encrypted. But yeah, that's my biggest issue with the fediverse, it's just not designed around privacy. It's also why I'm working on my own lemmy alternative, I want something a bit more privacy-friendly.
I don't think working on a LinkedIn alternative is worthwhile because it relies even more heavily on the network effect. The only point I see in LinkedIn is in finding jobs, and getting employers to look at something else is an uphill battle I don't want to fight.
My understanding is that Activitypub federation and that sort of privacy are somewhat incompatible. Because someone could always just create a new instance and then federate the stuff you don't want shared with them.
The point would be sharing data that's not useful without the key. So you could share your public key and public metadata, but to access private data you'd need to get approved first. An approval request would be encrypted with your public key and contain a response key, and your response would contain your response encrypted with their key.
You obviously wouldn't be able to control what they do with your data once decrypted, but all of that back and forth can happen in the clear without giving up private information. It's the same way GPG/PGP works over email, just on a fediverse instead of SMTP.
It really wouldn't be all that hard to implement, I just don't think it would get any meaningful traction because LinkedIn is so reliant on the network effect.