why don't you throw some sample pictures up? If at a minimum id like to see what you can make.

If you're participating in a discussion and then memory hole your contributions, nobody can read up on the discussion, since part of it is missing. You could also write up a news story and then memory hole it yourself, if you feel like it.

The ability to remove something you published can be used maliciously. Thus, one of the points of decentralization is to prevent anyone from even having that ability.

Meanwhile, cats in the west

https://files.catbox.moe/8mjgxy.jpeg

Not sure what malicious use would be. I haven't ever seen the type of drama where someone says something, deletes it, and then denies ever saying it and gets into arguments with people about it.

Ultimately, advantages are subjective for different people. You value posts existing forever but many people prefer the opposite. Signal is popular partially because of the disappearing messages feature. I think especially on the right, people will increasingly value privacy over convenience. I think we are probably heading into a very totalitarian, technocratic future where it will be more and more dangerous to have right wing views.

Personally, if I see a very interesting post online, I sometimes just save it in a document on my computer. If scuttlebutt implements the delete message feature, it would be nice for them to also have a save message feature that saves the message but not the username. Or allow users to just remove their identity from messages that they don't want associated with themselves any more. Similar to how reddit shows [deleted] for the username after someone deletes an account.

Patchwork and apps like it could agree to not show deleted messages in their user interface. That way, if someone was making backups, it would be harder to read deleted messages. It would still be possible, but the person doing it would need to know how to decrypt them. Don't know if that would be a desired feature by the community or not, but it would be a way to get the delete feature as complete as possible.

Not sure. Seems like we'll see more destruction and violence though this summer as relevant cases begin to go to trial.

Those lesbians got some splainin' to do!

I can see why people would want that feature, but it wouldn't change that somebody would have the ability to memory hole something, which isn't desirable, since it can be used maliciously and thus has the ability to harm trust.

If I can't trust for everything to remain there forever, there's no big advantage over centralized solutions.

Luckily, by design, all the content I see ends up saved on my computer, so with a differential backup, it should be trivial to go back in time and read memory holed posts.

GDPR only applies to personal data. Whatever you posted is still fair game. Especially if it was under a pseudonym in the first place. It's different from the "right to be forgotten".

Also, on a technological level this process isn't automated. Someone has to go in there, make sure it's your data and delete it manually from the database. It could be automated in the future, but it wasn't in the past and without building everything from scratch again, it also won't be in the future.

Also, I'm an IT guy from Europe that is very fortunate that no one ever asked for shit to be deleted. But on the bright side, even if somebody did, there's still no way for them to verify that we actually deleted everything. So reasonably, all we have to do is to no longer expose their information and nobody would be any the wiser.

Btw, I just found the part of the docs that explains how their cancel culture type views have influenced the protocol. You can publicly block someone, and that is announced to your peers. So for example, if a popular leftist scuttlebutt user publicly blocks someone saying it is because "he is a racist/sexist/homophobe/whatever", there would probably be peer pressure for others to publicly block the same person.

If someone is bothering you or saying things you don’t want to hear, you can block or ignore them from their profile page (in the Options button). This will hide their messages and comments from you. You can loudly block someone, or quietly ignore them. A block is public and everyone can see it. Blocking is a way to demonstrate community norms and alert your friends to someone they may also want to block. Sometimes it starts useful conversations. Ignoring quietly is a secret action that only you will know about. It hides the person from your view.

https://scuttlebutt.nz/docs/introduction/detailed-start/#stay-happy-and-safe

It could be pretty useful feature for the right as well though. If some user was posting child porn and a peer publicly blocked them for that reason, I would appreciate getting a heads up so I could block them as well. Same if leftists attempted a raid on right wing "pubs" and users. They could be blocked.

I think the main advantage of decentralized over centralized is that other people can't memory hole your posts. If you can memory hole your own posts, that is an advantage. If you ever get in trouble with the law, it's helpful to have no online history that they know about. Ideally, they will not know your username, but the right is too online now compared to the left. The right really should be using the internet to facilitate offline organizing more often, and that introduces the possibility of law enforcement knowing your online identity. But for example, if you are defending yourself from Antifa and get charged with assault, you may be happy if you deleted all your posts before meeting up with people so nothing you said can be twisted and used against you (though they might say it's suspicious that you deleted all your posts. It's nice that in Matrix, changing your password encrypts all your old posts by default, which looks less suspicious). The NSA or FBI could certainly still have the posts you deleted and know that you made them but local law enforcement is not so sophisticated.

I think you could have scuttlebutt or something like it, which stores all messages for you to read offline, but also have a feature where if you say that you want all of your posts deleted, then your computer could send that message out to all of your peers. They would forward that message to any of their peers who can also read your messages. (See the "Follow Graph" here https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#follow-graph ) The peers that are already online would respond immediately and delete your posts from their local store. Some of your peers and peers of peers with access to your posts could be offline so they would still retain your posts temporarily, but when they connect to the internet again, those peers would see that you want your posts deleted, either by checking with you or their peer who is connected to you, and they would immediately delete them as well.

In the scuttlebutt documentation I saw that in the future they do want to allow people to delete posts and it is just a feature they haven't implemented yet. They also want to hide IP addresses by default.

We want Scuttlebutt to be a safe cozy place but there are still some things we need to fix: Blocked people can see your public messages.
Content from blocked people is still on your computer. (This is almost fixed!)
Patchwork has some bugs that let you see blocked people in certain situations when they should be hidden
Scuttlebutt doesn’t provide IP address anonymity by itself, but you can use it with a VPN or Tor.
Messages can’t be deleted yet.

https://scuttlebutt.nz/docs/introduction/detailed-start/#stay-happy-and-safe

The way we learn to become adults is by learning to think. Stifling speech prevents individuals from engaging in dialog that may lead them to learn to think through problems. Stifling free speech leads to anger, an emotion that blocks rational thought and encourages petty little people to remain children.

Very paternalistic. The author allows for no righteous anger and no resentment. There is only the argument against misinformation, just like the mainstream liars make. It's false.

You wouldn't have to do anything complicated like that. Just create regular differential backups of everything, then you can go back in time and see the posts again. One of the points of decentralized networks is that you can still read everything, even without Internet. So if you design it in a way that requires an internet connection to read posts, it's no longer decentralized.

Another point is, that the reason people want to use decentralized solutions is so that nobody has the ability to memory hole anything. Not even typos. If that's not the case, then what's the advantage over centralized stuff?

Matrix is federated, not p2p, but when using it I noticed that if I changed my password, the encryption key for my posts would change as well which would make all of my past posts unreadable to everyone including myself, but my new posts would be readable. Of course if my past password was weak, it would still be easy for someone to decrypt my past posts.

It was possible to delete and edit posts as well. And if you disabled an account, you were met with a warning saying that people would not be able to read your past posts, which may disrupt the flow of conversations. Also, creators of a room could set it up so that any new user had no ability to view the old posts in the room. You could change your display name at any time, but your unique id is the name you chose when signing up. Your unique id is visible to anyone who right clicks on your display name.

When it comes to p2p tech, so far everyone is saying what you are suggesting is impossible, but I am at least interested to know whether it would make sense to code something similar to this, or if something similar already exists:

All posts are encrypted. nodes you connect to store your posts, but in encrypted form, and they store the encryption key for your posts. They store a generated unique id, not your display name. So if someone wants to save your posts to use against you, they have to have some basic technical capability. They need to know your account's unique id, not display name, and use the stored key to decrypt the posts associated with that id. (Most would just screenshot it in this case, which can be more easily faked so there is more plausible deniability for you)

You can change your encryption key at any time. If you change the encryption key for your posts, then the key will be changed for all nodes connected to you, making your past posts unreadable to yourself and connected nodes

if any node disconnects from you or you disconnect from it, your files automatically get deleted from their store and their files get automatically deleted from your store.

If someone really wanted to hold on to someone's posts to use against them later, they could of course make a copy of the store before they disconnect from the other node, but they would need some basic tech knowledge to decrypt what is in it. Unlike making an archive link of some centralized page which requires almost no tech knowledge. If the p2p network gets popular enough, someone might make a service to simplify this process for people (similar to archive.org). But privacy would at least be comparable to centralized services.

But I know jack shit about coding p2p protocols and applications.

Decentralization by means of replication eliminates the power to control that data entirely, in exchange for dissemination. The way to distance yourself from your posts is the same as on an image board: create a new pseudonymous persona, or maintain no persona at all.

In federated systems, nodes rely less on local stores, so deleting data from a node may work better. It helps make Mastodon/Pleroma confusing and fragmented because instances capriciously block other nodes and users without any signal that's happening. The result is users subscribe to multiple nodes lest their conversions be mangled by getting muted by third parties.

Federated systems could be more friendly and work with users' idea of privacy, but that requires them not to abuse the powers which they abuse now. There's no future for it in wide-spread society, and any smaller group you trust to not abuse it, you can also trust to not abuse your posts.

The entire point of decentralization is to make exactly this impossible. The promise is that no one even has the ability to memory hole anything.

The right to be forgotten isn't granted in the centralized world, either. On a technical level, all that happens is that what you posted gets hidden. Easily retrievable ten years down the line, if someone with access wanted to. The reasons for that are legal in nature, as far as I know. So if it's a small site without a bunch of lawyers in the background, you might have a chance to get your stuff actually deleted. Especially if the one who operates it likes the concept of privacy. But as a user, you have no way to verify either way.

Since decentralization redistributes power from a single source to everyone, in a decentralized network everyone has that ability. Of course, everyone would first have to agree on hiding the content in the first place.

I don't really get why people want this "right" anyway. It doesn't exist in real life. All your records are kept and all the people involved will remember. Imagine if Donald Trump would say "guys, I really want to be forgotten online, please delete everything mentioning my name". That would be ridiculous, wouldn't it?

True, I was aware of the leftist leanings of the developers and much of the community.

Still, it appears that if conservatives and free speech supporters decided to connect to each other, there isn't much that the rest of the network could do. They could make sure they're not connected to us, so we would have less visibility from their part of the network, but they wouldn't be able to break up the existing connections between right wing users. One of the worst things about de-platforming for the right has been that people end up losing connections to each other when a platform gets taken down.

They are partially just relying on deterrence right now, as that PDF mentioned.

SSB has never advertised itself as a free-speech platform though it does have many of those qualities at a technical level. Additionally designers have Rebellious Data LLC & Emmi Bevensee ​| 15 purported that they pursue a range of aesthetic choices aimed at attracting or repelling certaintypes of users. For instance, clients and the official webpage often use pastel colors, on the homepage​ there is a cartoon about an inter-racial queer love story that explains how scuttlebutt works, and many clients have implemented content warnings. Interviews stated this was all intentional to turn-away hateful users.

All that said, privacy is generally more important for the right than the left because the left is allowed to get away with more. So a different project that is not so leftist and more focused on privacy may be a better choice for conservatives to migrate to.

From the pdf:

Those guided more by right-wing ideologies in the P2P space tend to focus more on things like crypto-currencies and extremely privacy focused free-speech tools, which are more ​likely​ to be abused by hate-groups whether that is the intention of the developers or not. There are powerful positive implications in both P2P privacy tools and crypto-currencies, however it is important to acknowledge this potential alongside their built-in affordances.Those focused more on social-justice influenced liberatory tech tend to focus more on P2P tech geared towards connecting people and try to build in more protections to protect abuse.

That's kind of what I've gathered but hopefully I get hit with some knowledge. My understanding is only very basic of it. And I still hop on Zeronet / Aether and lurk. I know other, similar networks exist too.

I'm not shitting on those types of networks, they certainly have value that centralized networks do not. Not sure if there is a good 'in-between' where a user/individual still retains the ability to control the data they've published after clicking "submit".

Only if the users and nodes cooperate. So, no.

I wonder if they're doing this because they're planning something that would make A LOT of people angry. I mean something that would make both sides want to storm the capitol. Maybe some kind of engineered economic catastrophe to accelerate "the great reset"? Maybe hyperinflation that would wipe out the savings of most average people but spare those who are in the know about what's coming?

I have no idea, but they keep making up BS excuses for why they need so many troops there.

They uptalk: https://stealthisshow.com/s04e04/

They are plagued by nightmares of being adjacent to nazis: https://rebelliousdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/P2P-Hate-Report.pdf

They want a "community" instead of technology. And they don't want us.

Looks cool, I'll check it out.

I may be one of the few who isn't super giddy about decentralized P2P networks though. They certainly have their benefits, but I also like the idea that things I say/post can also be deleted and not around for as long as other people/servers/nodes/whatever have it.

Maybe I'm just unfamiliar how networks like these work and centralized networks certainly have many flaws as well, but at least I could, if I wanted, axe this server and my data and everyone else's would die with it minus any sort of 3rd party archiving done by individuals (Ex: archive.is / waybackmachine, etc)

EDIT: Ah, requires you to run an app or program to access it. Not a normal website, similar to Aether. I'll hold off for now, but welcome newcomers to the market and anything that weens people off of traditional social media like Facebook/Twitter.

This is the website for the project

https://scuttlebutt.nz/

Good policy!

I get the point of calling attention to this sort of thing but anyone who sees a "no whites allowed" event and thinks "I should sign up for that" is probably someone I wouldn't rock climb with or hang out with in general. Now they are saying it's OK for whites to join the class too, but is that really a victory for white people? No self respecting white person would want to take "BIPOC Rock Climbing".

I respect black only, Mexican only, and Indian only, and white only groups because that is people getting together over a similar heritage and culture. But if a meeting of different races is specifically excluding one race, the main thing they have in common is a desire to not be around that race. I'm happy to oblige. I don't want to be around people who don't want to be around me.

It's unfortunate the tuition that whites pay goes partially to paying for classes like this but maybe rather than complain about discrimination coming back, a better response would be to just hold (or attempt to hold) alternative events. For example, spread flyers for a rock climbing club which is only for white people and their allies.

RESIST