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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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