this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026

51 points (98.1% liked)

No Stupid Questions

47449 readers

1022 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)

Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.

Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.

Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.

Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

technopagan@lemmy.world

Does the fact Stoat.chat doesn't have E2EE mean the server owner can read any and all messages, including DMs? (pawb.social)

submitted 1 month ago by Inkstainthebat@pawb.social to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm aware of what end-to-end encrypted means in a technical sense, but does the lack thereof guarantee the messages are just plaintext readable to whoever's manning the machine?

My guess is yes but I've been known to have wildly incorrect guesses so I want to double-check.

all 16 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 31 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Probably yes. General rule of thumb is if you don't control the keys, it doesn't matter if it's E2EE, your communications could be intercepted. Famously iMessage is E2EE but your keys are uploaded to iCloud under standard data protection. They say "Your iCloud data is encrypted, the encryption keys are secured in Apple data centers so we can help you with data recovery, and only certain data is end-to-end encrypted." ^[https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651]. The encryption key is included in iCloud backups which is provided to law enforcement with a subpoena. ^[https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/01/21/what-apple-surrenders-to-law-enforcement-when-issued-a-subpoena]

Even if a service claims it is E2EE, it's still important to understand where that those encryption keys are stored, how they're managed, and if security researchers have raised concerns about the E2EE claim.

[–] Steve@communick.news 27 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It would mean the server owner can almost certainly read everything. Though it may not be in plain text. It could be encrypted on the server. But the owner would need to have the keys to decrypt and read everything so it all works.

[–] chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Technically yes. Likely they still use Transport Layer Security that will encrypt the messages in transit, but that encryption is controlled by the company, and not the end user. What that means is that your messages are safe from randos in the cafe on the same wifi as you, but if the company wanted to, they could read them. It also means that if messages are subpoenaed then they can hand over the unencrypted messages to the authorities.

I tried looking at their documentation to see what was going on under the hood, but there were a lot of connection errors and dead ends. They seem to be open source, though, so if you are so inclined you can comb through their code to see what kind of encryption they use.

Personally, I'd stay away. It doesn't seem like something that I could put my trust in.

Edit: Upon further inspection, I can see that they host on third party servers likely in plain text. That means that these third party hosts have access to your information, too. I'll go ahead and take this opportunity to double down on not trusting this company with my memes.

[–] guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Note: stoat is self-hostable. There’s no federation (yet?) but you can run your own server easily

[–] chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks for the stoat note.

...I'm sorry.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

No yer not :D

[–] Dojan@pawb.social 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Last I read about it they weren’t planning on ever implementing federation. Hope they can change their minds.

[–] guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 2 points 1 month ago

On their roadmap thingy they do have it, but from what I can see, it’s at the very bottom of their priority list. So it might be something they’ll consider far in the future, but not necessarily soon

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Use Matrix. It has E2E encryption.

[–] galaxy_nova@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I matrix anywhere near discord? Also last time I used element I had so many issues with e2ee

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago

I don't know why @fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world said "it's nowhere near discord". The Element client supports voice and video rooms and certain servers have extensions installed for custom emojis. I don't know what else Discord does that's special. "Servers" in Discord are "Spaces" in Matrix. Spaces can have rooms.

The major difference I find are the moderation tools in Matrix. They have to be installed by the server admin and can't be activated per room by the room admins or mods.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It’s not. It’s more of a what’s app than discord.

[–] galaxy_nova@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah that kinda defeats the purpose of a discord replacement for me. Also matrix seems to be a behemoth that integrates super slowly. Stoat does have e2ee planned, so now would be a great time for everyone with skills to contribute. I personally am trying to hack a different desktop frontend because I’m tired of web apps before the api becomes too complex.

[–] floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago

It's better to be on a server that is encrypted but not E2E if the admin is someone that is well intentioned and abides by the sudo oath, than on a corporate "E2E" platform where they manage your keys themselves