Anonymous communication via Hubzilla

Dr. phil Jens Holze

yodahome@hub.medienbildung.ovgu.de

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Anonymous communication via Hubzilla

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 03:45:27 -0700

!Hubzilla Support Forum Hi everybody!
This may be a stupid question but... I'm wondering how Hubzilla could be used to collect anonymous feedback from users or have people exchange anonymous messages. Like a virtual suggestion box, where people feel safe to posts criticism and feedback without anybody knowing who they were.
The idea is to enable university students for which we want to use Hubzilla as a social network to be able to express concerns, suggestions or problems to members of staff or student representatives anonymously (so it should be limited to the same hub and specific channels/accounts). Is there a way to do that with build-in functionality or have there been experimental apps etc. that can do this? Sorry, if this has been asked before and I haven't found it. Thanks for reading!

show all 6 comments

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 05:19:39 -0700

Will the hub be federated?

If yes, the students can create a channel which doesn't reveal their identity on a remote populated hub and post from that channel. Of course the admin of that hub knows which account holds that channel (and thus he knows the e-mail-address with which the account has been created). If the student would run his own hub and if that hub has only few channels, one could find out who is behind that channel by doing some IP address lookup about that hub...

If the hub would not be federated:

without anybody knowing who they were

If "anybody" means anybody except the admin of your hub, then it's simple. The students then just can create a new channel which doesn't reveal the identity on your hub and post from that channel.

For the non federated case and the need of keeping it secret from the admin of your hub, I have no solution to propose. Maybe the hubzillla community has...

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 05:55:18 -0700

I think this has little to do with Hubzilla itself.
You can write such Deaddrop box App or just simple PHP script and include it in channel page via widget

You can write simple widget including submit form from any PHP app you choose and using PDL editor include it in Hubzilla interface where you want.

Another enhancement would be PHP Deadrop form being sensitive to URL from which the submission was made, checking if it is valid and saving the URL with message, so you know from which channel it was

If you want authentication using Hubzilla but not saving the user info, it is a bit weird, but maybe you can write such a widget also.

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 03:37:55 -0700

Perhaps an alternative such as XMPP may be more appropriate. For example, 'conversejs.org', or other OTR/OMEMO compliant tools ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMEMO)?

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 05:30:53 -0700

@Emanuel That's an interesting approach, the hub is indeed federated. But I guess we would prefer the solution to be on the same hub.

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 05:35:45 -0700

@Michal Klodner Well, maybe not on an abstract level, but the idea is to use Hubzilla as a social network to augment real world interaction that is not available atm because of all teaching being virtual. Having students be able to give anonymous feedback would be the alternative to forward requests via the students council in person which doesn't work well atm because students also don't meet on a regular basis. So technically it's not Hubzilla-specific, but in practice it would be a nice-to-have.

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 05:39:16 -0700

@Mike Macgirvin Thanks, that's the direction I was thinking of. I will try that. Federating over different protocols would not be an issue in this specific scenario (or at least we don't believe it would be rn) but it's good to know the limitations.