Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Hrefna (DHC) (hrefna@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 08:27:36 JST Hrefna (DHC)

   "Meta also can’t promise that when you delete a federated post on Threads, it will also get deleted on the other platforms it was shared on"

   I mean that's just the fediverse in general, especially with how it works today. Even the ActivityPub spec doesn't make a strong statement on how this is supposed to be handled ("should remove it" from public view is not "must delete it").

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 08:27:35 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @hrefna It comes down to copyright and privacy laws. Unlike on commercial social media, there's no ToS that gave them license to copy & present works folks posted to their own instances in other contexts, commercially exploit them, etc. There's only some vague, implicit, revocable permission to use them in accordance with the author's intent for how it show up in a mastodon/fedi context.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 08:29:18 JST Erin 💽✨

     in reply to

     • Erin 💽✨

     @hrefna (And like, thats fundamentally unknowable, no matter how you design the software)

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 08:29:19 JST Erin 💽✨

     in reply to

     @hrefna in practice I think it would be fairly easy to amend the protocol spec to say “If an Actor removes themself, delete all Objects exclusively attributedTo them”, which is also the semantics that exist today

     But its not like this is easy! You still don’t really know which servers have a copy of a given object

   • Embed this notice
     Hrefna (DHC) (hrefna@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 08:29:20 JST Hrefna (DHC)

     in reply to

     Oh but wait it gets worse. There's basically no way to fix this without completely unwinding the protocol, because there's no concept of _ownership_.

     So what do you do with an event that has two actors if one of those actors gets deleted?

     The protocol is silent on how you should handle this sort of thing.

     You can reasonably say that this isn't a "protocol-level" thing, but if you say that then it means AP is entirely unsuited to most privacy-sensitive applications.

   • Embed this notice
     Hrefna (DHC) (hrefna@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 08:29:21 JST Hrefna (DHC)

     in reply to

     This gets even worse when you consider messages such as follow requests, undo requests, update messages, etc.

     Everything with an id.

   • Embed this notice
     Hrefna (DHC) (hrefna@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 08:29:22 JST Hrefna (DHC)

     in reply to

     Like this is just… not good. According to this if I've sent 2000 messages to ten servers then I need to send at least 40,010 messages to complete remove myself (20,000 Create statements, 20,000 underlying objects, 10 account deletes)…

     …and it still is only a SHOULD remove the _representation_.

     #ActivityPub