Elbmar wrote on March 9, 2021 at 2:21 AM

Reply to comment by Wahaha in How do P2P, decentralized networks work when it comes to a user or individual wanting to remove their information from it? by Rambler

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.

Wahaha wrote on March 9, 2021 at 10:32 AM

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.

Elbmar wrote on March 10, 2021 at 1:59 AM

People can delete their messages but I haven't seen it happen enough that it really bothers me.

Yeah it's preferable for news stories to remain up forever. Maybe IPFS could eventually become popular enough that news organizations use it as well. But in the meantime archivists can use it to archive news stories permanently. I agree that it's important for news articles, scientific articles, statements from politicians etc. to not be memoryholed. But ideally, right wing groups should use private anonymous networks with auto-disappearing messages because it's safer. Members being targeted by law enforcement has a much worse effect on a group than any negatives that might come from people deleting their own messages.