The lesson being, if you need a high degree of privacy, don't use SSB. Or if you are using it for sensitive things which require anonymity then never let someone IRL know your SSB id and visa versa...

I think this needs to be communicated really super clearly in the into videos which at the moment are misleading.

the secure in secure scuttlebutt does not mean privacy or anonymity. This space is under .

I think tor does a good job of educating around this area.

Personally I am not naming people or moving away from the default profile pics ... for me, it is better safer than sorrier.

post private message with an image and then link to that image

this is possible with the recent scuttlebot changes (which allow private messages to be indexed with other messages) and support for private blobs, #somebodyshould!

Ganging up on people and forcing humiliating names on them is something schoolyard bullies do, and we shouldn't support it in any shape or form.

@Cy as a personal counter-example: my university friends "forced" the nickname Mikey on me, i was initially very resistant to it, how dare someone else choose my name! until i realized they were using the name as a term of endearment, turns out not all nicknames are meant to hurt the other person, now i notice all the ways nicknames are used to share love.

Could you upload offensive profile pics?

At the moment you can upload anything.

To me the whole idea is that SSB works just like real life.

ssb is just like real life on steroids (at least for individuals).

where real life is that we can gossip AND have some of the powers of corporates like google (hodling data) AND the NSA (ability to look back through this data to day dot).

There are really great challenges here. I personally want people to be able to assert things about other - remembering that this was originally a security features in a another sense i.e. as a mechanism or marking false identities.

I don't think stopping people naming and imaging people is the right solution. e.g. if I'm going to out @ye+QM09... as being "John" you can't stop me (that's my key in case you're worried).

I think things we can and could change are:

• the ritual of naming
• the algorithm showing names

The Ritual of Naming

Given this could be a dangeous thing to do, or a loving thing to do, I think it could be good to design the path and interface to reflect that. When you invoke the naming spell, the rest of your interface darkens out bringing focus and appropriate gravity to the occassion. The opening right has you read a messsage reminding you of the forces that you're playing with, about social dynamics, about love, and about abuse. It reminds you that if this ritual goes wrong people and community can be hurt (the caster included).

Socially filtered names

Johnny Null (whom I can no longer even invoke via mention because I've blocked) went on an abussive naming spree. The name he gave me was "Eunuch". But who gives a fuck... who even is that tool, who cares? I think the algorithms we use should reflect our social fabric. I love and agree with a lot of what's been said and proposed about existing and future implementations. I'd add that we can go further. We can read the social interactions between people. e.g. @noffle has known me long enough and we follow each other, and have been in enough conversations that you could perhaps safely assume that his nicknaming me @yupa was affectionate (he asked me as well). Meanwhile if I don't follow someone, have not been in conversations with me and they start labeling me ... that's probably abuse at worst, or poor social sense at best - a mark against that naming act, and a mark against the human doing it IMO.

Could be interesting to ask the scuttlebutt right now who is naming who and what their relationships seem to have been. e.g. did throw a like on that Yupa nicknaming. Have I subsequently liked things noffle has said since he nickanmed me and has used that name in messages to summon me?

Another idea - @Kieran is working on a more generalised Invitation type of message (this is going to be used for social secret backups, and hopefully also for chessgames). What if naming and imaging was an invitation?

1. I send a private INVITION asking @Dan Hassan if he'd like to also be @Danny
2. If he consents, he publishes a public ACCEPT (which could also include the private key that would reveal the original invitation
3. Others seeing this could then be like "cool, we can call them Dan / Danny now".

I am excited by your last suggestion @mix

This one.

I agree that a protocol level approach is going to lead to the most consistent opening of space... requiring subjective view at the client side (and thus consistency of convention across clients) will be a weaker one and might not get us to where we want to be...

In %minbase and %mvd I use a simpler avatar algorithm that only honors the avatar images uploaded by their authors. Also, these clients do not allow you to upload avatars for other people.

Handling avatars this way solves this security issue.

I also think this is the expected workflow from people coming from other social networking platforms. You can't upload a photo for someone else on Twitter or FB.

This won't stop someone from uploading a photo of you, but it won't be appended to your profile page for everyone to see upon first load.

Good application of the invites @mix!

@mix "I personally want people to be able to assert things about other - remembering that this was originally a security features in a another sense i.e. as a mechanism or marking false identities."

Perhaps it would be sufficient to display on a persons profile a list of the people who have given person A a subjective name. You could then ask any of these people what they have called that person if they are comfortable... this is a more discreet/privacy respecting ring-of-trust.

An alternative approach is something like what keybase does -

person A binds their keybase id to other ids on the web
keybase authenticates these assertions
person B follows person A and keeps a logs of the assertions made
each time person A's assertions change person B is asked to accept the assertions