One of the project areas of the Social Web Foundation for the last year has been end-to-end encrypted messaging. ActivityPub, the standard protocol that powers the Social Web, has privacy controls, but they do not protect the content of messages from server operators. Encrypted messaging has become a standard feature on most social networks since ActivityPub was created, and its lack has inhibited Social Web adoption and public trust in the network.

ActivityPub is extensible, though. As part of our E2EE program, Mallory, Tom and I adapted the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) standard as an extension of ActivityPub to make the MLS over ActivityPub specification. The protocol fits the great MLS E2EE system onto the ActivityPub API and federation protocol.

But a protocol specification is not enough; it must be implemented. That’s why we’re so happy to announce that the Sovereign Tech Fund has commissioned work with the Social Web Foundation to coordinate two new interoperable implementations of MLS over ActivityPub. This investment by the Sovereign Tech Fund will help move the Fediverse towards more privacy for social web users, no matter what server they use.

We decided to partner with two different projects in order to make sure that we’re making an open standard that can work between implementations. With two implementers, we’ll need to communicate clearly about architectural and implementation decisions, and make sure that those decisions end up in the final version of the spec — not in a TODO comment in the source code of a single project.

The first project is Emissary, the great social web application platform behind projects like Atlas and Bandwagon. Ben Pate, Emissary founder, says, “The Emissary Project is deeply committed to the Fediverse, where we are building a free and trustworthy Internet for all 8 billion humans. Delivering on that promise, Emissary is excited to team up with the Social Web Foundation to bring End-to-End-Encryption (E2EE) to the Fediverse. We are eternally grateful for the SWF’s leadership and support, without which this project could not have happened. Our work is already underway, and in 2026 anyone will be able to build E2EE applications on the Emissary platform.”

The second project is Bonfire. Bonfire is a modular framework for building federated apps, with its first app (Bonfire Social) offering a social networking experience enhanced with tools for privacy, trust, and collaboration (such as circles and boundaries).

The maintainers of Bonfire, Ivan Minutillo and Mayel de Borniol, said: “We think that end-to-end encryption should simply be the default for any private communication online. Working with the Social Web Foundation to bring E2EE to ActivityPub marks a crucial step in fostering privacy and trust, and especially in enabling the fediverse to become a safe space for activists and communities to organise, coordinate, and collaborate meaningfully. By making secure, user-friendly messaging a core part of the fediverse, we’re helping lay the groundwork for decentralised networks where people can go beyond talking in the mythical ‘global town square’ and actually organise and accomplish things together.”

This work will happen best if the Fediverse community tracks it closely. We’ll be making updates here on the SWF blog as progress continues. Developers and active users may also be interested in the ActivityPub E2EE Messaging Task Force at the W3C, where the specification is being developed into a report for the Social Web Community group. Finally, we’ll be using the #JustBetweenUs hashtag to share progress and ideas, so you can follow it to see what’s been happening.

~ The URL is punycode, before anyone im comments suggest this is a shady link 🙃

A rather interesting article shedding light on how the famous Y Combinator’s Hacker News platform is steering its content away from users of they want to.

::: spoiler The full article here:

The Mysterious Forces Steering Views on Hacker News

18 December 2025 at 11:06 by marius@xn--gckvb8fzb.com (Marius)

JP. マリウス

I was initially torn about whether to publish this story, as I don’t have a clear or constructive recommendation on how to resolve the issue. I also didn’t want to come across as a paranoid conspiracy theorist – birds aren’t real, by the way. However, after repeatedly witnessing firsthand how Y Combinator’s Hacker News platform influences the spread of information and, consequently, opinions within the tech scene, I believe this topic deserves to be discussed, even if only briefly.

I approached this subject rationally, aiming to explain certain metrics I observed in my log files. I began exploring the Hacker News algorithms, along with related posts by other authors and, naturally, the comment sections of those discussions. Although I hadn’t previously delved into the topic, the deeper I went, the more I realized it wasn’t just a case of me being overly paranoid or seeing ghosts. It became increasingly clear that some form of censorship, whether through subtle slowing or outright blocking, does seem to be a recurring issue on the Hacker News platform. By censorship, I don’t mean the removal of deceptive or harmful content, but rather the suppression of factual material that happens to be critical of, let’s say, friends of Y Combinator.

I began writing this post after noticing unusual behavior when another one of my articles was shared on Hacker News. It triggered an immediate spike in traffic, which then dropped off abruptly for no apparent reason. While the post in question appeared to resonate with many readers, it rapidly fell from the top ranks of the Hacker News front page to the second, then third, and within minutes to the fourth page.

The decline was so sudden that even the very people whose product my post was criticizing, and who understandably weren’t pleased with it, stepped in to dispute any claims of censorship. Nevertheless, the data from my analytics clearly shows a traffic chart in a shape that couldn’t be further from being organic, leading to the assumption that the post was demoted from the front page both sharply and deliberately.

Note: The Element CEO’s comment reads:

neither YC nor any YC-intermediary is an investor in NV

This statement, however, doesn’t appear to be factually true. Protocol Labs, who is the lead investor of the Series B funding round of Element (New Vector), was initially founded as part of the Y Combinator S14 program.

This means that Y Combinator invested money into Protocol Labs, who in turn is a lead investor in New Vector, the company behind Element. One could argue that there is in fact an interest by Y Combinator, or at the very least by their friends over at Protocol Labs to protect Element from negative publicity – if you can even call my post that.

Similarly, I analyzed gigabytes of log files and traffic behavior for another post of mine that gathered some attention on news.ycombinator.com just recently. In this case, however, the censorship became more evident, even to the casual reader on Hacker News. If you’re looking at the post today, though, you might not fully understand the comments, as the post is clearly no longer flagged.

This critical deep dive into a specific project by a well-known tech figure took off within minutes of being shared on Hacker News. My analytics immediately alerted me to a surge in traffic, which is when I first noticed. The post reached the Top 5 list (on X) on Hacker News’ front page within minutes, accumulating over 40 upvotes in a short period. Then, abruptly, the traffic came to a complete stop when the post was suddenly flagged by Hacker News for no apparent reason.

Even though the post was flagged and essentially became invisible on the platform, community interest remained so high that the post went from about 50 upvotes to over 100, all while still being effectively censored. It wasn’t until several hours later (amid puzzled comments from the HN community and others) that Hacker News seemingly decided to silently unflag the post, as if nothing had ever happened and the post simply didn’t gain a lot of traction. And it worked:

The post had dropped from the visible ranks and wasn’t going to return. Hacker News had effectively stopped it at just the right the moment, when it could have gained serious traction, as it was scrutinizing a project tied to a prominent and influential tech figure.

While the post was picked up by Lobsters and spread further, attracting many views and, more importantly, thoughtful responses, its reach didn’t come close to matching the influence of what seems to be the most powerful tech aggregator on the internet.

Tl;dr

Hacker News is neither unbiased nor free from censorship. While it generally remains hands-off with neutral content, the moment a post that’s critical or even just slightly negative towards projects or companies affiliated with Y Combinator (either directly or indirectly) gains traction, the platform’s moderation team will seemingly step in to significantly limit its reach.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe there’s anything the community can do about this, as Hacker News has maintained its position as a leading tech news institution for years, with little competition on the horizon. As search engines continue their decline and are increasingly replaced by similarly censored LLMs, the discoverability of tech content, especially slightly more critical pieces, is likely to become a significant challenge in the future. My only advice is to keep in mind that, whenever you find yourself browsing Hacker News, you’re seeing a curated view of the current tech landscape that won’t necessarily represent the full picture.

:::

I had another post and got some great advice, thank you to everyone who took the time, but I've learned so much over the last 2 days that I wanted to be more direct and clear since I'm still stuck. Mostly I just want to know if I'm on the right track, and if anyone had any advice. I don't just want to get things working, I'd like to understand why. After a lot of digging, I feel like I might be close to getting it.

I have 4 secondary internal drives, and 2 external. They all mount as root 777, I can access things but I also use Emby server. Emby can see everything, but can't write. So that said, here's how it started to where I'm at, does this sound like I'm heading in the right direction?

1. CachyOS mounts to /run/media/user (the user folder has a lock on it) and I had to password/mount all drives at every reboot. I read something about /run being a temp folder so I looked into auto-mounting after some advice.
2. I learned how to set up auto mount with gnome disk utility, which writes to fstab. Great! fstab hurts my brain after filling it up the last 2 days. I set them to mount to /mnt/drivename, and they auto mount at boot. So far so good!
3. I can now access my drives, so I began setting up my server. No problem this time! Emby sees the directories and scans them. Finally! However even though I can rw on the drives, Emby sees them as read only. Bummer.
4. Checking permissions, the drives are all mounted as root, with 777 permissions (which I suppose is why I can write to them but I don't get why Emby can't, maybe because it's a different user?).
5. Time to get permissions! sudo chown does nothing. Still owned by root. Right click/permissions shows root:root, owner, group, other all can view and modify content, and it's all greyed out. 'Cause it's root, duh.
6. More digging, the drives are NTFS! Apparently Arch mounts NTFS with root ownership, permanently. This makes sense! I think I found my problem! Maybe.
7. Now I'm here, asking you wonderful nerds before I continue. I'm planning to change the mounts in gnome disk utility back to default (slider) and unmount and reboot. No idea if they'll mount to /run or /mnt. Next, I have ntfs-3g installed and plan to run mount -t ntfs3 /dev/sdxY /mnt though I think I either need to create a drivename folder in /mnt or add mount -t ntfs3 /dev/sdxY /mnt/DRIVENAME the drive name to the end and it'll create it maybe?

The other thing that's bugging me is that gnome disk utility writes the mounts to fstab. I'm thinking if I do it this way, fstab will still have the old info and it'll cause issues? Putting the slider back to default probably won't just clear the fstab rules. That'd be too simple haha.

I'm totally not opposed to just reinstalling yet again and starting from scratch, if my plan will work. Any guidance is greatly appreciated!

EDIT: I think I got it! For anyone with the same issue, I added uid=1000,gid=1000 to the end of the options strings in gnome disk utility. I am now the owner of the drives, Emby can do what it needs to do, and the permissions stuck after a reboot! Now I just gotta look into why that worked haha.

EDIT 2: Spoke too soon. After a reboot they were ro for Emby again. I added rw to the drive options and it worked again. But after another reboot, no go again. Turns out after each reboot unmounting then remounting works. Not sure if there's a way to make this work. Maybe they mount too soon? I dunno, but for now it's functional.

Just today I'm getting errors when trying to install software via apt in Debian 13. Specifically ardour and gnome-boxes. Other packages seem to be unaffected, like gimp and blobwars for example. The errors are all variations of the following:

Err:1 deb.debian.org/debian trixie/main amd64 libwebsockets19t64 amd64 4.3.5-1
404 Not Found [IP: 151.101.62.132 80]
Error: Failed to fetch deb.debian.org/debian/pool/mai… 404 Not Found [IP: 151.101.62.132 80]

Looking online the suggestion seems to be that I might have /etc/apt/sources.list misconfigured. Is it this causing the problem, or something else?

Here is my sources.list

# deb cdrom://[Debian GNU/Linux 13.0.0 _Trixie_ - Official amd64 NETINST with firmware 20250809-11:2>

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main non-free-firmware 
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main non-free-firmware 

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ trixie-security main non-free-firmware 
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ trixie-security main non-free-firmware 

# trixie-updates, to get updates before a point release is made;
# see https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch02.en.html#_updates_and_backports
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates main non-free-firmware 
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates main non-free-firmware 

# This system was installed using removable media other than
# CD/DVD/BD (e.g. USB stick, SD card, ISO image file).
# The matching "deb cdrom" entries were disabled at the end
# of the installation process.
# For information about how to configure apt package sources,
# see the sources.list(5) manual.

Thanks!