this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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There aren't serious technical obstacles but it may be a poor idea if it turns into a hive of abuse. I got into a discussion about implementing forum software a while back and I said I wanted it to have encrypted DM's, and several operators jumped in and said it would probably attract more trouble than it was worth. People wanting direct private comms can always use encrypted email. On Reddit whenever I wanted to discuss anything the least bit private, I generally asked to exchange email addresses with the person or similar, and went from there in some cases to a self hosted encrypted chat.
Anyway this feature should be weighed somewhat carefully. Are you going to do the thing with warrant canaries? Any attempt at all to conceal metadata? Etc.
On Lemmy you can't exchange email addresses though... else you'd be exposing the addresses publicly and that's also rife for spam
Of course you can PM your email address to someone. It's not encrypted but it's not exactly public in the sense that spammers can see it.
I was under the impression it wasn't even truly private, nevermind encrypted. Not actually sure how it works though
It's somewhat private. Like when you enter your email address to make a Lemmy account, the address is stored on the server. The admins can see it and it could potentially escape in a server breach, but it is not intentionally made public. So most of us don't worry. The interest in encrypting pm's is that they can potentially be more sensitive than email addresses.