alt Hacker NewsThe 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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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?
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?
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
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
what if I want to publish something publicly on the internet though
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?
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.