Past Proposals For Deleting In SSB And Something (Possibly) New
I remember first reading about off-chain content in @Aljoscha post here %QJEpN8L...
In Basel I heard @cryptix explain #gabbygrove (link
I started thinking more about deleting
idea no. 1 (indieweb-ssb)
I had been reading about POSSE and the indieweb,
I thought what if I had posted my poem as an image/post on my personal website (mfowler.info)
and then the ssb post had just been a link to this image
this creates a real possibility of delete (agency over our presentation of self; the right to be forgotten and recreated)
i could just delete the post from my website, and the ssb post would still be shared around, but the link would be empty
i imagined clients that were built based on this model
… perhaps in the client you specify as a setting an integration with your website/domain
and when you post, in the background, the client is posting to the website, and creating a link to the post
… other clients are seamlessly (temporarily) reconstructing … ssb is a network for discovery, but your website is where the post actually lives (and can be removed and edited)
… it kind of makes sense, but it feels clunky and complicated (which is my general criticism of indieweb)
i imagine explaining how all of this works to a non-technical friend and it sounds not impossible, but arduous (this is a red flag)
idea no. 2 (delete requests)
thinking more about how delete requests would work, and conversations with aljoschka
I can see how the idea of having delete requests in an append-only log really does complicate the whole system
… even if everyone in my network is a good actor and deletes the content I ask to delete,
and holds on to the delete request, and refuses to re-download the content if a bad actor or new person offers to send it
… still, even then… if someone received the content that I wanted to delete, then went off grid for 1 year before receiving the delete request,
and then came back onto the grid, and started re-distributing the content … it would re-appear back into the network unless everyone held onto the delete request forever
… a delete request is really just an ID of a post to be deleted, and it might be possible for everyone to basically keep a permanent database of the ids of every post deleted ever… but this still feels like a weird pattern (and possible red flag)
while thinking about this, I felt more understanding for the choice to say that there is no delete in ssb… its just part of the nature of a decentralized protocol that deleting is more difficult (perhaps not impossible, but non-trivial)
idea no. 3 (ephemerality, expiration dates)
to avoid this permanent holding onto of ids of all deleted messages ever,
perhaps we could just make ssb more like air
for example, we could make it a default property that good actors delete any message after 1 month (or the suggested time until auto-delete could also be a property on the message)
this relates to concepts that I heard discussed in Sustainable Storage session at Basel (I didn’t go, but heard the notes), and has the additional advantage of helping reduce the size of storage that each user of ssb keeps
with bio-mimicry as a guide, mimicking air feels like a good direction
further, this doesn’t exclude us from the possibility of voluntarily archiving, or voluntarily choosing to preserve messages longer than the default auto-delete, it just turns these into specific choices
publishing a poem i scrawled out after drinking 3/4 of a coffee in a haze of sunlight, immediately permanently archiving it would not be my first choice
as a system to enable ephemeral and archival (and in-between) publishing, one could imagine:
- the default property of the system is auto-deleting other people’s messages after 2 weeks (or the specified expiration date in the message)
- for the log of your own messages, you keep them indefinitely, and using something like gabbygrove or offchain-content, you have the ability to delete them at a future date (personally in a client I would like the UI of archive + delete … where when I delete, I am publicly ‘deleting it’ / stating that I no longer want to share this post when asked for it, and also optional personally archiving it offline)
with a little added complexity, for a little more robustness, could also imagine specifying a particular pub as your “trusted replica” and this one pub also keeps your messages indefinitely
… but by reducing this to just one (or finite specified) number of other machines that indefinitely store your content… we get rid of the messiness of having to keep delete requests around… as we assume that everyone else in the network who is not you or your trusted replica, is automatically going to expire/delete messages
this also helps with bad actors. if the expiration date is cryptograhpically included in the message, then if a bad actor tries to share around a message past its expiration date, good actors can easily choose not to receive or display this message
with expiration dates, ssb becomes primarily an ephemeral network (the current page). the length of the auto-expiration date then effects the robustness of the reach of the message. if you want to reach as many people as possible set a long expiration. if if it feels like something more ephemeral, set a shorter expiration date.
if someone sees a reference to an expired message and wants to see if you are still publishing it, or have extended the expiration date (renewed the message), they can try asking you (or your trusted replica) for the message directly
… this last part gets a little hazy with my still-blurry understanding of how the low levels of ssb works…
… but something closer to this model… semi-ephemeral decentralized broadcasts, long-lived copies on your machine… sounds nice to me
archiving has nice properties (unearthing old discussions, webs of reference %qEppDlY...), and I’ve heard people talk about how no-delete also has some positive influences on the types of messages people post… but something is also lost
it seems like a nice design constraint to me that if you are going to keep a permanent archive of others peoples things, you should have some way that creators can request for things to be removed … and if you can’t offer that, then maybe it shouldn’t be permanent
the desire for things to last forever is pretty suspect in the first place
maybe someone has already thought about all this, this is just the rambling thread of thoughts that led me here
