Interesting. I can see how some people would prefer the opposite. Can you elaborate on the reasons behind that? Just curious to listen to you.

It's hard to enforce forgettability, specially in a decentralized platform. It's hard to do that even on a centralized platform. Nothing stops a friend or an acquaintance to record everything you do in your social circles. You could of course stay with privacy messages only, but then, nothing stops the recipient from storing that and eventually betraying you. So, how to achieve forgettability? Is it even feasible?

It's not about friendships, but about "friendships". SSB lets us talk to "friends"-of-"friends", and right now I wouldn't trust you more than I would trust any stranger on the street, so this is public. I don't see it as black and white, I just see public as the opposite of private. If it's a little bit not private, it's not private at all.

But if I suddenly do something foolish on my very public and busy street, it will remain an occurrence fairly private to the current street dwellers. It most likely won't be accessible to everyone on the planet for ever, and I think that makes a lot of sense socially.

Let's imagine the year is 1917. You do something foolish on the street, some people see it, and go away. You forget about it, most of them forget about it. But one person remembered it quite well. 30 years passed and this person is still telling "that story of the fool on the street". Soon, this person is elected president, he is being broadcast globally, and he talks about the story of the fool on the street. Then he sees you passing by and yells "that's him! that's the fool I saw 30 years ago!"

Now, the year is 2017 and this situation is much easier to happen because people take videos on their phone and publish it on YouTube. Just to make sure it stays online forever, they also host it on Torrent. What are you going to do about it?

I also think it's better if we start viewing SSB like Twitter, not like Facebook, when it comes to data transparency.

Follow-up: Facebook has created a truly wrong intuition of data privacy, through being such a closed platform. It's not impossible to create a Chrome extension that crawls your FB feeds and stores that in a database which is viewed as a public website. But people's intuition is that somehow a FB secret group is truly secret and/or forgettable. Snapchat forgettable videos are also creating this wrong intuition. It's, at the end of the day, impossible to digitally forget.

Okay, I understand that you want a way to decrease the probability of your data being crawled by Google, and while that is possible through shutting down all ssb viewers on all pubs you are connected to via 2 hops, I'm telling you that it's highly unlikely that this will happen in your friends-of-friends network. So you either have to be very strict about your circle of friends and FoF, or just give up the desire for forgettability.

Another way of saying this is: because SSB is totally decentralized, it doesn't matter if you can convince one person or the core team to stop ssb viewers. You have to convince all of the SSB users to never ever use any ssb viewer. It's like shouting to the whole world "everybody stop smoking right now because I don't want to be a passive smoker".

This may help to create a better intuition of SSB decentralization: every time you say "SSB should", or "Patchwork should", try replacing that with "All the people in the planet should" and realize how nearly impossible it is to achieve that. Because...

But that doesn't mean, e.g., that everyone on snapchat will be recording everything.

That's because there is just one Snapchat app which the Snap company controls. With SSB, every time someone makes an app or program, anyone can fork that and make a version with search engine crawlability and storage forever.

Check this out! http://128.199.41.108/view/%2544GoQVjNmQumvXfQblVnghSppa6B6rNEGFESWnTGDMM%3d.sha256

:D

Probably it's the most recent assigned name to you, by anyone. The name algorithm can be improved.

@tiago relax, there is no antagonism here, and that ssb-viewer server I linked to was already online for many days before this discussion.

going back to the original question here, about search engines indexing viewer.scuttlebot.io:

we have means for requesting search engines to index things or not, per-page and per-link:

http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/

we could implement a similar advisory protocol, for ssb feeds: a feed author could publish a message describing how they want their messages and feed to be indexed or published. options could be like:

• "don't serve my messages on the inernet"
• "don't serve my public activity log on the internet"
• "tell search engines to not crawl my feed"

we could also shape what pages search engines find, more broadly. originally, ssb-viewer only served message threads. that meant that for a search engine to index a message, it would have to follow links from threads which had their URL shared. now, ssb-viewer also serves user pages and channel pages and user activity feed pages. although the user activity feed pages are not linked to from other pages, the channel and user pages do inter-link with the thread pages. hence search engines can follow links to find and index all content on the network. if we would prefer the older way, where content is only indexed if it is discoverable via message links from a message that is directly linked to, all we have to do is instruct search engines to ignore the channel pages, user pages, and user activity feed pages.

other ideas:

• public viewers could check if a message has been flagged before serving it, and hide flagged messages. or the same message schema used for describing how a feed should be crawled/served, could be used for individual messages and blobs as well.

• authors could include a property in their posts to indicate that the message should be hidden from public views and/or search engines.

how would you like to direct search engines to index your ssb messages and feed?

wow this thread is so long already!
please forgive if I have missed somethings that have already been said.

also @tiago have you read @keks's posts on deleteable messages? he wants private messages that can be destroyed after.

• I recognise that public messages are not encrypted, so future network members will see them.
• group encrypted messages will probably mean most viewers (unless someone gives them the key) will come back to them. This is something I am personally motivated to work towards.
• twitter has delete but it doesn't work well, and people just screenshot stuff. at least if people expect signatures you can't claim someone said something they didn't.

It's very hard to implement a distributed delete that works well, and I want to build something that works really well. That said, I'm not against it on principle.

SSB is an open platform, unlike the silos, there is nothing stopping you from changing anything. Apart from the natural technical challenges, and collaboritve diplomacy, and getting people to use your feature/app, but if you can overcome all that stuff you can make it happen.

Pettitioning the current developers might work, but speaking for my self at least, already have an almost overwhelming amount of stuff I want to achive.

You currently can't vote on this, even with your wallet, but you can vote with your entire body and soul and make it happen.

@lzlr @tiago on that last note, see the side protocol heading on my forgettability post.

Actually after reading @cel's last comment, I think yes the thing in the original post could be very easily achived - just make a PR to ssb-viewer to add robots.txt by default. Opt in per thread is too complicated, not being indexed by goog does seem like a reasonable user expectation. For messages/threads that are shared outside of ssb (like, in a blogpost) would still be searchable by finding that blogpost and clicking through. This seems like an okay-in-the-short-term solution? @tiago?

I don't have anything against making it hard for google to index the scuttleverse, as it may work to delay the dissemination of information in the short term, but it's most important to educate everyone and set the correct expectations about the following:

Everything that is posted on ssb will be "gossiped" for eternity.

Not just in terms of actual ssb gossip, but also of indexing by others outside of ssb. This could be generalised to everything you articulate in life. Not everyone will agree to play by your rules (not least robots.txt rules), and you only need one person to disseminate your data outside of your preferred circles.

One way to think of it is: if it's outside my brain, it's public.

Now, it's possible to work on physical infrastructure that extends the boundary of the privacy afforded by the brain (it's what I'm working on), so it's possible to capture private thoughts digitally, but those must remain under your complete control. When you press any button such as "Publish", "Send", or "Share" then that data is no longer under your complete control and you should not expect any privacy with regards to it. It's impossible to achieve DRM on nodes which you do not control (trusted platform modules notwithstanding).

We will always feel regret or embarrassment about things we said publicly in the past, that's just a part of life and I suppose it's a sign that we grew up in some way. It's a good sign IMO.

the trouble with these sorts of discussions is one person is like "I have all these secrets I want no one to ever find out" and you wonder, what could it possibly be? but of course you can't ask, because that would defeat the purpose.

solution is just to assume it's embarassingly bad teenage poetry.

Oh, maybe we can use @indutny's poetry generator to encode encrypted files as bad poetry and then know one will know if you are writing bad poetry or not because everyone will be

the name resolution algorithm in ssb-viewer is as simple as @andrestaltz describes: source.

i want to eventually make another ssb viewer using patchcore. #somebodyshould