I couldn't think of a way to federate privately, when we don't know which software is at the other end. In the current political environment there are going to be groups of people who simply can't take the risk.
For example with mastodon's followers-only notes - that only gives some privacy because there is massive social pressure on any fedi implementation that doesn't follow the gentleman's agreement we have to hide those notes. That fails when implementations have bugs, are under the control of ICE, or whatever.
It's tricky! Happy to bounce ideas around on it sometime. Maybe encryption...







