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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

The more I read and consider Bluesky and this protocol, the more pointless -- and perhaps DANGEROUS -- I find the idea.

It really feels like no one is addressing the elephant in the room of; okay, someone who makes something like this is interested in "decentralized" or otherwise bottom-up ish levels of control.

Good goal. But then, when you build something like this, you're actually helping build a perfect decentralized surveillance record.

This why I say that most of Mastodon's limitations and bugs in this regard (by leaving everything to the "servers") are actually features. The ability to forget and delete et al is actually important, and this makes that HARDER.

I'm just kind of like, JUST DO MASTODONS MODEL, like email. It's better and the kinks are more well thought about and/or solved.

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Author here. I think it's fair to say that AT protocol's model is "everyone is a scraper", including first party. Which has both bad and good. I share your concern here. For myself, I like the clarity of "treat everything you post as scraped" over "maybe someone is scraping but maybe not" security by obscurity. I also like that there is a way for me to at least guarantee that if I intentionally make something public, it doesn't get captured by the container I posted it into.

This seems like tensions between normal/practical and “opsec” style privacy thinking… Really, we can never be sure anything that gets posted on the internet won’t be captured by somebody outside our control. So, if we want to be full paranoid, we should act like it will be.

But practically lots of people have spent a long time posting their opinions carelessly on the internet. Just protected by the fact that nobody really has (or had) space to back up every post or time to look at them too carefully. The former has probably not been the case for a long time (hard drives are cheap), and the latter is possibly not true anymore in the LLM era.

To some extent maybe we should be acting like everything is being put into a perfect distributed record. Then, the fact that one actually exists should serve as a good reminder of how we ought to think of our communications, right?

Exactly. Anything that's ever been public on the internet is never really gone anyways, and it's unsafe to assume so. This is similar to publishing a website or a blog post. Plus, from a practical (non-opsec) point of view, you can delete items (posts, likes, reposts, etc.) on ATProto, and those items will disappear from whatever ATProto app you are using - usually even live. You need to dive into the protocol layer to still see deleted items.

Your first statement is good advice, but is factually WRONG. Stuff does go away.

We know this from the other side of it, stuff that we WANTED to keep, but couldn't. Google deleting blogs, people not maintaining their own personal media records, etc.

Now. What is a good forward GIVEN THAT we do know that stuff CAN go away? My gut is that a good balance of "making personal stuff available to people who want to see it again" vs. "surveillance state" could make use of the unreliability of "the net." And that ATProto's "perfection" isn't all that helpful.

Your last point is one that I used to be very strongly favor of, and today?

Nooooooooooo. No. No. No.

It's not going to happen and we shouldn't even consider it. Seriously. This thing we are doing here, which is "connecting people to each other," those forces for MANY will be far more powerful than "let me stop and think about the fact that this is forever." I just don't think we are wired for it, we're wired for a world in which we can just talk?

I think it's better to try to engineer some specific counter to "everything is recorded all the time" (or, as in here, not try to usher it into existence even more) than to try to say "welp, everything is recorded all the time, better get used to it."

It would be nice to engineer a way around this, but I don’t see it. Fundamentally if we want to be able to talk to random people, we’ll have to expect that some might be capturing communications, right?

I think there's a massive difference between "some might be capturing" and "reliable, e.g. hashed records"

Again, there may be some VALUE in the fact that "some might be capturing" WOULD BE inherently unreliable. The ability to "muddy the record" could make some SAFER.

It's true that Mastodon is somewhat better if you don't want to be found, though it's hardly a guarantee. From a "seeing like a state" perspective, Bluesky is more "legible" and that has downsides.

But I think there's room for both models. There are upsides to more legibility too. Sometimes we want to be found. Sometimes we're even engaging in self-promotion.

Also, I'll point out that Hacker News is also very legible. Everything is immutable after the first hour and you can download it. We just live with it.

>helping build a perfect decentralized surveillance record

a record of what? Posts I wish to share with the public anyway?

It's not about the access, it's about the completeness. Imagine this paradigm takes off (I hope it does!), everyone has their own PDS and finally owns their data. Social apps link into their PDS to publish and share data exactly as they're supposed to.

Well now someone's PDS is a truly complete record of their social activity neatly organized for anyone that's interested. It's not a security issue, after all the data was still public before, but the barrier to entry is now zero. It's so low that you can just go to stalker.io, put in their handle, and it will analyze their profile and will print out a scary accurate timeline of their activity and location leveraging AI's geoguesser skill.

That is how it works, but people shouldn't be posting their location or sensitive information publicly if they don't want it exposed like that. That's basic opsec. Private data is currently being worked on for ATProto and will hopefully begin existing in 2026.

> people shouldn't be posting their location or sensitive information publicly if they don't want it exposed like that

They shouldn't, but they still could: accidentally paste in the wrong browser tab; have been stupid when they were 12 years old; have gotten drunk; or a number of other things.

If that's your threat model, then I think the way forward is to maintain separate identities. There are trade-offs there also of course: fragment yourself too much and the people who trust you will now only trust a portion of what you have to say... unless you have the time and energy to rebuild that trust multiple times.

Of course that's the same with the web we have today, the only difference is that you get control over which data goes with which identity rather than having that decision made for you by the platform boundaries.

The completeness AND the reliability!

Consider that a muddy, "oh a bunch of different servers downloaded this guys history, but it's different on one from the other" could be ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE SAFER from a surveillance perspective.

This is a line of thinking that just supposes we shouldn’t post things on the internet at all. Which, sure, is probably the right move if you’re that concerned about OPSEC, but just because ActivityPub has a flakier model doesn’t mean it isn’t being watched

what if I want to publish something publicly on the internet though

Maybe some could want to publish something publicly but anonymously?

You can do that already — just don't post under an account that has your real identity

In theory it should be possible to allow users to upload ciphertext that they can then share a decryption key with their intended audience. I believe atproto has dissuaded against this with the argument that ciphertext shouldn't be in public view, but this seems to hinge on the idea that the cipher is insecure, or will be in the future. I don't see why using a post-quantum encryption scheme shouldn't provide the appropriate security, which may still not be foolproof, but it certainly would make indexing the data much more difficult

When it comes to the internet, tech is law. There is no way to publicly share something and maintain control over it. Even on the Fediverse, if either a client or server wants to ignore part of the protocol or model, it can. Like a system message to delete particular posts for anti-surveillance reasons can simply be ignored by any servers or clients that were designed/modified for surveillance. Ultimately the buck lies with the owner of some given data to not share that data in the first place if there's a chance of misuse.

Shouldn't the ability to forget and delete content that was ever public on the internet be considered fictional anyway?

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