Just curious if that is the case. I assume not as Lemmy does not advertise it’s encryption at all.
Would this ever be planned for Lemmy?
No, they only have transport encryption with TLS. This is why we recommend Matrix instead. I think Mastodon is working on E2E encryption for ActivityPub, but it seems extremely complicated.
It would be nice to have them, it’s an additional attraction factor for users. It could be done using hybrid approach where one hash derived from user password is used to authenticate in Lemmy and retrieve chat list, second completing hash would decrypt them. Example: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/
Implementing E2E isn’t just about the encryption though, it’s also about the key exchange/distribution/generation approach.
If you look at what Matrix does, so much of the complexity comes from how they authenticate all the different clients to manage E2E in a distributed way. For proper E2E you’ve got more than 2 ends (multiple clients) so you need to manage it for all.
