like can i send a dm to someone and talk to them here?

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    371·
    2 days ago

    Yes. Click on any person’s username and under their bio there is a button to send a direct message. Not really a live chat thing yet, lemmy does not have the backend for that.

    Note, DM’s over Lemmy are NOT encrypted, only obfuscated, any federated server can read the DM’s you send. Keep that in mind when choosing content to talk about.

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      This is not correct, Lemmy sends private messages only to the single recipient server. Other instances cannot access it at all.

    • sirxdaemon@lemmy.caEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      Wait, what? It’s just the sender and receiver’s instances that can read the message; it’s not just any server right?

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        I believe you’re right but don’t know enough about the real back end magic to confirm. What matters is that dm’s are not private and should not be considered private, both in transit (during sending) and at rest (copy sitting at each server)

        • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          2 days ago

          Someone could point out where I am wrong but essentially it is the same as a standard email in that there is a plain text copy stored in both the send and receive instance. Maybe it is easier to think of as just another comment where instead of @domain.xyz has read access, just the specified user@domain.xyz has read access. The server admins could still see them if they wanted to, just like Yahoo, Google, etc can in plain text (which is how SPAM filters often, as if the email was actually encrypted they wouldnt know the content inside it to try to filter it out.

          More end to end options are coming to the fediverse, (Matrix has been around, I saw something last week another was coming) but really most people don’t ever encrypt data they send to others, and don’t care usually.

          See: Epsteins emails being accessible without decrypting anything. There were people who supposedly found his password in the released files, and just logged into outlook or whatever with it. End to end encryption should have required them to have s/mime (handshake performed) on that specific device to see the emails, so it would have all been garbledegook. Aka plaintext was stored on both server ends until deleted by the companies/users.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        21·
        2 days ago

        The fact that a message is addressed to a single person does not mean that it’s only sent to that person. In theory, anyone following you will receive a notification about the message.

          • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
            1·
            20 hours ago

            I wasn’t talking about the specifics of Lemmy, but ActivityPub in general. You can not guarantee that just because a message has been addressed to a single actor that only that actor will see it.

            • Nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              18 hours ago

              If any Activitypub platform sends messages to an actor which they arent addressed to, thats clearly a bug.

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    14·
    2 days ago

    Yes, but if you want a real one-to-one, private chat system use Matrix or XMPP. Treat anything you write on Lemmy as public information.

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Not public. Private messages can only be accessed by your own admin, and the admin of the recipient. Other instances cannot access it in any way.