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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete. Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it. Additionally, a user cannot generate delete requests if they get banned from their server or the server shuts down. Users and server admins can't control whether another server permits archiving of their content. Mastodon and other fediverse software allows following public posts by RSS, and RSS clients might keep them forever.

The only reasonable understanding is that these protocols are for for publishing to the public. It is not possible to reliably retract anything published to thousands of other peoples' computers. We used to try to teach people that the internet is forever, and that's even more true with federated protocols. That doesn't make them a bad idea.

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> The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete.

The internet is forever, don't want it propagated? Don't post it.

> Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it.

Probably because they cannot truly guarantee or enforce it.

I think it's important to remember that decentralization is a barrier to having control over your data. If you're going to participate in these systems, you should treat everything you do as permanent, because by design you will not be in control of where that data is stored.

But at proto is equally open? You can also just save all of at proto.

You can save all of anything someone makes public with ATProto, ActivityPub, or RSS. You can do that with anything someone puts on a web page too, but those protocols simplify automation.

I understand why people want to be able to delete things from the internet, but it doesn't work that way. It has never worked that way. It can't work that way unless every computer is locked down to running remotely attested government-approved software, and that's obviously worse.

Once you hit publish, it's public and anyone and everyone can save a copy and distribute it. If you don't like that, don't hit publish.

ATProto won't be this way for much longer. Permissioned data is coming and will not be broadcast or accessible without grants. This will sit next to the public data, but separate.

So ATProto is about to die, in other words.

It was already wayyy too complex. And this? Yeah, they (you? sorry) really need to just give it up.

The vast majority of people don't want their activity broadcast out to the internet for anyone to grab.

Permissioned / private data is non negotiable for any social media tech trying to gain mass adoption.

I would say the opposite. If you don't want your activity public, don't put it on the Internet.

How do you think about Google Docs? I consider that "on the internet" since it is not on my computer. Same for private channels and threads in Discord.

Also, ATProto can be much more than social media tech, more like a plug-n-play distributed system

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

Are you serious? Y'all are so confused about what this is.

The entire point of services like Bluesky and Twitter is broadcasting your activity out to the internet for anyone to see (which of, course, is technically little-or-no different from "grab")

ATProto is not Bluesky, the later is just one app on the former. There are many more apps like Tangled, git on ATProto, which need private repositories.

You seem rather confused. I do not work for Bluesky. I am an independent developer building completely separate applications on ATProto.

Fair, I'm aware and I am conflating what people do with Bluesky and what ATProto can do. I absolutely do see the value in ATProto doing things that aren't "social media"

I hope the bluesky team can as well, as we work towards permissioned data support.

Actually, yes, it does.

Or more precisely, it might. We now have a better idea of how people actually behave and it's not in accordance with "the internet is forever," and I have no interest in blaming them for 'human nature' in that way.

And it's all still dangerous. Again, I know the internet is forever, but someone else posting about ME might not.

This isn't an individual thing. It's "ecological."

And I have no interest in making Big Brother THAT MUCH EASIER to build.

This comment seems to be saying you don't want most people to do blog-like things. Most social media from Facebook to Youtube is blog-like if you squint.

It does seem like fewer people are posting personal content that way lately. Perhaps most people are better off sharing things one to one, or in small groups that are meant to stay private. That doesn't make it bad for the more public formats to exist; they're just not for everyone.

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