#ThoughtProvoker 🤔

#ThoughtProvoker

In daily life, if you talk to someone, you have the right to remember what was said, right?

And if you don't possess photographic memory, you have the right to take notes, keep record, maintain a diary, yes?

And no one has the right to order you to forget your memories, or under normal circumstances to destroy your notes?

So if you have a single-person #fediverse instance, it is okay then to ignore #ActivityPub Delete requests to erase your memory of online public conversations you had with others?

#SX #SocialCoding #SocialWeb #PersonalSocialNetworking

@smallcircles so personally as someone with dissociative memory issues, our answer is yes, there is a moral right there. it may still be polite to delete stuff when asked to; that's a separate question. both are important.

@smallcircles Erasing a Deleted post, does not erase the memory ‍️

@smallcircles@social.coop thank you, glad im not alone in thinking that "other person can delete my chatlogs" is awful. i should be able to opt out, possibly with a big red "this user does not accept delete requests" notice.

@django that is a good "other" choice. The delete request is processed to add a marker to the note, as an update and reminder of the preference of the original sender. So it allows for the "politeness" aspect that @ireneista mentioned on the other reply.

https://adhd.irenes.space/@ireneista/statuses/01KR5H4ZY3CMFYV3N6R3Z6R9CA

@smallcircles@social.coop in the case that posts aren't visible through the instance unless you're logged into it, i think this holds. the calculus might shift a little if other people can view them, since your instance could potentially be used by others to view posts someone else wanted deleted. i don't think that's enough to make ignoring delete requests not okay, but it's a factor worth considering imo

@smallcircles I think it would be moral - and interesting - to make a queue to manually review delete requests.

Personally, growing up with IRC, I expect my online conversations to both be completely missed by the party I'm trying to talk to and archived forever by half the world's governments and a few assorted hobby data archivists. Deletion is not really a "thing".

@smallcircles I'd definitely not display anything publically that's been requested deleted, though. That would be quite impolite.

@srxl yes, that is a very good point. Thanks.

@ireneista @smallcircles want to highlight in your response here how you identified a specifically moral right, which is a helpful and important progression from the terminology of unprefixed rights invoked in OP. without a framework to reconcile fundamental rights, two people may claim to have mutually contradictory "rights", which is the classic paradox that results from a framework of purely negative liberties (freedom from vs freedom to). rights frameworks (and legal systems more generally) seek to reconcile facial contradictions with a series of structured compromises between parties. if a government were legislating the fediverse, these would be decided as a matter of law

@ireneista @smallcircles i'm replying not to educate irenes (who taught me much of the above in the first place) but to identify to onlookers that your invocation of the moral right here is more subtle and powerful than it may appear at first because it speaks to that very tension inherent in a system of rights we would like to create together. it's a very radical thing to propose a system of government, even more so one with guarantees of protection as described so concisely here

@ddr yes, good point. It was also brought up by @srxl in https://fedi.foxgirl.engineering/notes/am1gmqzb4bzr3fl1

@hipsterelectron @ireneista

Great follow-up. Thank you.

@ireneista @smallcircles i also think cryptographic systems should be discussed in these terms because while the game theoretical constructions in terms of oracles work for academic purposes, the intentionally abstract thought experiments they invoke also serve to depoliticize engineering decisions

@smallcircles It would be fine for you to keep a private record of *some* kind, I'd say, but you probably ought to honor the request to remove the post because displaying publicly what someone has requested removed from public view does have a moral dimension, IMO.

Not a clear "yes" or "no," mind you. What the post contains, who is asking, and why are all pertinent to judging the moral aspect of compliance.

@smallcircles@social.coop I think it really depends. Does the single-user fediverse instance allow unauthenticated third-parties to view posts?

If the answer to that is "Yes" (which it is by default on most fedi server software), the whole argument falls apart, because you're republishing someone's words after they explicitly revoked their consent for this, rather than simply keeping private notes.

@hipsterelectron @smallcircles thank you very much. yeah, we often forget to explain all that until someone draws us out on it. it really should be said more often.

@ireneista @smallcircles one curious analogy to OP is the variance across US states around the legality of recording a phone call. making it illegal to record a phone call you participated in typically renders the recording inadmissible as evidence (so you can't use a recording in court). this makes certain forms of whistleblowing illegal and makes it much more difficult to litigate an employer for sexual harassment. therefore, this "two-party" law (as observed in the state of california) structurally disadvantages plaintiffs.

@smallcircles @django @ireneista

per the spec, deletion should replace the original message with a Tombstone. This allows it to exist without breaking threading (as it happens instead on Mastodon). The Tombstone could also be implemented similarly to an Edit with a private record of the original message: so external viewers would still see that a message existed, but the instance single user could still view the content when they want.

ActivityPub

The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the [ActivityStreams] 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content.

(www.w3.org)

@ireneista @smallcircles however, in advocacy (and even in the name "two-party"), the matter of recording is not cast in terms of litigation between adversarial parties, but as if it were a more intimate discussion between two good-faith individuals who are not currently filing a lawsuit against each other. one might even go so far as to think the two-party consent law would protect you against self-incrimination by law enforcement, assuming that nobody can record you without your consent under any circumstances. this is unfortunately not how (nor why) such laws are written, because US state governments will only protect the rights of their own citizens at best, and only under duress.