Comment by vollbrecht | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vollbrecht | Hacker News Reader

What would in practice happen in a two user scenario where user A replied to user B, and later user B's repository gets completely deleted.

We have this cache thing via wss connections. Do they invalidate this messages from user B? Is user's A worldview now completely dead?

Owning a thing in the internet is a complicated topic i guess.

Preserving past information via copying what a user said so that it does not get lost maybe also in the interest of some users (equivalent to the webarchive). I understand that this contradict the whole "owning your data" premise, but fundamentally since it was open in the first place the thing always can be copied right?

Whatever content is produced in this "open social" network, some of it may have long lasting "value" to an individual. Is there anything to make sure that what they interacted with can not completely broken by the other site of the party?

If the user chooses to delete their account, it is a separate event on the network, which well-behaved apps should respect (and update their caches accordingly). So an app like Bluesky would display this as a reply to a deleted post.

If the user's repo just goes down (e.g. the host is down), then indeed it won't be available upstream and only cached versions will remain. It might be that the user is having problems, and the repository will be up on a different host later. It's up to each application how to handle this, but it seems reasonable to keep serving cached content since there was no explicit deletion instruction. E.g. I presume Bluesky would keep showing both replies in the conversation.

>I understand that this contradict the whole "owning your data" premise, but fundamentally since it was open in the first place the thing always can be copied right?

Yeah this is a tricky thing. The general guideline is that the user expresses intent (e.g. can delete post or entire repo) and well-behaved apps respect that intent. But of course there can be non-well-behaved apps that don't, or that permanently archive everything ever emitted.

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