Owner decision 2026-10-04: fix the account privacy findings.
- Sign-in. Every failure answers "That username and password do not match." after the same work: an unknown login
is hashed against a decoy, and the comparison is constant-time. "Banned" is told only to someone who gave the right
password. This covers /clientapi/user/login, /invitation/login and /oauth/login.
- Recovery.
- Every request answers the same sentence and queues a SendRecovery job, whether or not the account exists or has an
email. The lookup, the code and SMTP move to RecoveryJob, so neither the answer nor its timing says anything.
- Codes are kept only as a SHA-256 hash, for one hour. Migration _011 drops the plaintext ones, which never expired.
- A recovered password ends every session of the root. RootSessions sets CredentialsChangedAt, which JwtEvents
checks against the JWT's issue time, now stamped as nbf, and revokes each persona's OAuth tokens and authorizations.
- Deleting a root (RootRemoval: the admin route, or the restored self-delete at /clientapi/user/delete, which asks for
the password).
- Its sessions end.
- Each persona and each group it owns sends Delete{Actor} to its followers, its members and the accounts it follows.
- The personas' posts are emptied.
- /peasants/{name} answers 410 with a Tombstone (formerType Person or Group), as do its inbox and WebFinger, through
LocalActorService.Gone. The names stay reserved.
- The root keeps only a unique `deleted-{id}` name; the second deletion on an instance used to collide on
"Deleted user".
Also, from phase 2's pasture: GoToSocial files a circle post like a DM and shows it only to accounts it mentions. Each
member's copy, and a member's refetch, now also mentions that member silently. The GoToSocial scenario checks circle
posts in conversations, like DMs, and they pass there now, as on Mastodon.
657 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
Circles (owner decision 2026-10-04: fix them for compatibility):
- Mastodon 4.7 and GoToSocial drop a post that names none of their accounts, and a circle post named only the circle
and its /flock. OutboxPublisher.Publish now sends each member a copy that also names that member in `cc`, on the
activity and on the object, and names no other member. The Create, every Update (edit, poll, quote approval, policy,
through the new PublishUpdate) and the Delete (StatusService.Remove now uses Publish) all go that way.
- UpdateOf renders with the post's group, so an Update keeps a circle post's `audience` and a community post's `Page`
and title.
- A reply to a circle post stays in the circle, whichever client wrote it.
- A circle post can no longer quote a post that needs permission: asking would show the circle post to its author.
Posts that are not public, on refetch (SignedFetchAuthorizer.MayRead):
- Followers-only, direct and circle posts are served to a signed request from someone they were for, or from the
instance actor of a server where one of them lives. That is a follower or an addressed account, an addressed
account, or a member. Everyone else still gets 404.
- Once deleted they answer those readers 410. Mastodon deletes its copy when a refetch answers 404.
- A circle refetch names the requesting member, or the members on the requesting server, as the delivered copy did.
- /grunts/create-{id} serves the same.
- /peasants/{name}/whispers/{id}, a DM's `context`, was never routed. It is now the conversation's posts, for its
participants only.
SecureMode lets browsers through to the redirect to the public page, instead of answering them 401.
653 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
Communities:
- a post addressed to a community (to, cc or audience) is accepted
according to its posting policy - followers, anyone, or moderators -
and GroupDistributor announces the whole activity with `audience` to
the community's followers, plus the object for new posts so Mastodon
shows them; updates and deletes of community content are announced too;
- top-level posts are Pages with a name (the title, or a headline from
the text); /flock counts members, /wardens lists moderators;
- a Mastodon client posts into a community by mentioning it, or into a
remote group, which sets `audience`;
- an Announce of an activity from a remote group a persona follows (Lemmy)
is followed through: the object is fetched from its own origin, kept with
its AudienceURI, and fanned out to the group's local followers; updates
are applied in place and deletes checked against the origin.
Circles stop being local-only: an undiscoverable Group actor whose follows
are all requests the owner approves; posts addressed to the circle and its
/flock and delivered to members' own inboxes, never announced, never
public; a remote member's post into the circle is accepted from members
only. SignedFetchAuthorizer serves circle posts and collections only to a
signed request from a member or a member server's instance actor - 404 for
anyone else. Circles never surface in search, lookups, mentions, account
ids or profile pages.
Federation:SecureMode requires a valid signature on every GET under
/peasants except the instance actor. Group forms take a posting policy.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
thepraandClaude Opus 5.5