Steemit does not have an email system. I mean you will only get emails if you list your email address. Or name (from which the email can be found). This is done publicly. Once you do that, you can't ask for ...personal privacy protection. And there's nothing steem or anyone else can do for that matter. Same would happen if you were writing in reddit.
If I understand correctly you say that synereo allows users to make their content visible only to their friends or a selected audience. I really don't know how that can work with a blockchain. Once information goes into the blockchain it is theoretically accessible by all - unless you somehow encrypt the information with some key and only your friends have that key, but these keys would then be traded between users so that one can read the content of others without being their follower.
data is encrypted.
They are working on adding private messaging. But private messaging doesn't solve issue #1.
I think your disappointment may be related to your expectations regarding what decentralized systems can or should do. You want centralized-level safeguards on a decentralized platform. Is this feasible? I don't think so without sacrificing decentralization.
Yeah that's what I suspect but if your followers can decrypt the content, then they can also pass the decryption keys to others (?)
It's very feasible, and particularly on Synereo which has composability as a core design principle. Synereo is going to be a Social Computer, which means it can be programmed in any way we want to program it, using "Social Contracts" which is basically like smart contracts but for the social computer.
I setup the docker node to play around with, I'm still reading up on it and rholang etc. But it looks really interesting with the composability aspect as you put it. Might be able to replace or incorporate some other dApps like storj etc. So you can create contracts to rent extra storage space or cpu time and so on. Seems extremely open ended with what you could do.
I think thats actually solvable.
You could you have two keys? Your followers get a key and when viewing the content a positive check for the user key + follower key allows a third (stored) key to be added to the transaction signing.
Or perhaps just a check on user key + user is follower would work. This is just spit-balling. But i dont see an issue with multi-key signing to decrypt. It would however have several other downsides like usability, reduced public content (network effect), more difficult third-party app integration. Etc etc.
But the idea of encrypting content to be only viewable by some whitelist of users seems possible
Sort of, until your "private" content gets leaked or reposted somewhere. If you have a lot of followers you won't have any idea who did it either.
Not only could I encrypt it to a whitelist of users, I could encrypt some content with ABE, (attribute based encryption) so only users who have a certain reputation quantified on the blockchain can access it.
Issue #1 I personally have played a small part in helping with, posting a bug report on the github at for steemit.com. The 'mute' function is still a bit broken, but it actually hides posts now.
Yeah but they can still follow you around and post replies to anything of yours they want to and when you check your replies it shows up there already maximized so you have to read it. I have @feminism following me around doing this once in awhile. He is muted, but I still have to look at his replies. They only person I've felt the need to mute so far.
And whoever that is is gonna look like a twit. They can by all means go on doing this dumbshit but in the end they will get everyone they expose to their stupidity pressing the mute button on their popup. To implement a solution another way closes up and centralises the system.
Yeah he follows me too. Just a petty troll. I won't be sharing anything like email addresses here, this is a blogging platform not a social network!
@beanz, I beg to differ somewhat. It is a social network, but we are not being farmed for marketing information. There is many companies that use social networking tools, at the last place I was working, until 2 weeks ago, we used skype, and our support ticket management system had an inbuilt messaging system for tracking internal information relating to tasks.
The only substantive difference between a social network (eg, facebook, twitter) and this and other work-oriented communication systems, is the former the 'customer' is the product, where as in here, we are the producers and workers as well as sometimes consumers.
Actually the wallet can be used to send messages. Some people have been abusing that function already.
Yep, I've seen it - at least it's not email though...
Encryption could be quiet easy, public key cryptography. You can't "trade" the keys like that with PKI.
If I sent you my public key then you can encrypt a message which only I can read on my end. If you sent me your public key then I can encrypt a message which only you can read on your end. Because each of us exclusively have our private keys, only we can decrypt the messages even if it's stored on a blockchain.
I have received a private message over Steemit this way and no one can read it but me.
I was assuming the post is blockchained only once, otherwise (I'm assuming) it won't scale. I mean you'd need to have the same post encrypted as many times as there are readers. A 10kb post served x1000 would become 10mb.
Steemit can handle that kind of scaling. Is it a high value post though? A transaction fee would be required.
There are other ways too, like break the private key up so it's owned by a group and then let them vote to decrypt it in some fashion and then it's posted in a self destructing note page. There are ways if you really want to do it, or just look at Bitmessage which managed to do a decentralized encrypted 4chan type thing.
You can create a single key for the post and then encrypt that key using the public keys of the authorized readers. With 256 bit keys this is 32 KB of keying.
But still the problem remains that the posts after already being decrypted will be reposted or leaked.
Yep, I don't see how it can work. The more followers, the bigger the risk of weak "links" that could leak the info.
Plus all encrypted blockchained info are just running on a ticking clock till their decryption. I think Satoshi first said that you don't want any kind of encrypted messages in the blockchain - it would be an accident waiting to happen...