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I think that's a general concern with distributed social networking, and something that I've struggled with. Part of it is a social problem, resulting in the y

I think that's a general concern with distributed social networking, and something that I've struggled with. Part of it is a social problem, resulting in the years we've spent in centralized walled gardens. Nobody has the expectation that you can rescind an email, because the decentralized nature disallows that, so people socially adjust to that. Better distributed protocols shorten the window, so you can send out an update, then delete it, and hope nobody's seen it, and that the delete command was followed by all points. But there hasn't been a satisfactory solution to ensure that the data can be completely rescinded, regardless of whether a receiving host acts improperly. I'm always open to ideas on that front, as I bet most people in distributed social networking are.

joe_the_user 16y ago
The Facebook message you want to revoke is the Facebook message someone is going to take a screen-shot of. The idea that any posts anywhere are going to be revocable seems to me to ultimately be a fantasy Facebook uses to impel people to deposit all their data on Facebook (and Facebook corporation itself saves all the information that's ever posted on the site, oddly enough). Developing distributed social networks would be easier if you drop any efforts at revoking data. I suppose that's my idea.
- wickedchicken 16y ago
  Anyone who has seen outlook revocation requests knows to look in their inbox for an embarrassing e-mail. Yet, this doesn't mean that distributed revocation is an impossible problem: on the contrary, I think it's getting more important as people realize how much online information is out there. In a sense it's the "real" online privacy (instead of group access control that Facebook and Diaspora want you to think is privacy).
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    Yet, this doesn't mean that distributed revocation is an impossible problem: on the contrary, I think it's getting more important as people realize how much online information is out there. A moments thought should show that distributed revocation is inherently impossible except in an air-tight "trusted computing" environment. Such an environment may be possible to construct but that construction has been shown to quite difficult at the least (especially resulting in systems with exponentially inferior performance, turning O(1) problems into O(n^2) problems, "The Xanadu Project" had conceived of the before CERN but floundered on this problem, etc). Moreover, such an environment is so undesirable that I, along with quite a few others, would actively work to prevent it coming into existence. "The Right To Read" etc... ...and of course how important some unspecified group of people are coming to see distributed revocation as being itself has no relation to how possible it is.
anthonyb 16y ago
It's not going to happen. If you want an open, distributed protocol like email, it shouldn't be a surprise that it'll work like email. Perhaps you'll have a small undo window like GMail, but once it's gone out - it's gone out. I don't think that anyone who's seen lamebook is going to expect that semi-public information will stay that way.

joe_the_user 16y ago

The Facebook message you want to revoke is the Facebook message someone is going to take a screen-shot of. The idea that any posts anywhere are going to be revocable seems to me to ultimately be a fantasy Facebook uses to impel people to deposit all their data on Facebook (and Facebook corporation itself saves all the information that's ever posted on the site, oddly enough). Developing distributed social networks would be easier if you drop any efforts at revoking data. I suppose that's my idea.

wickedchicken 16y ago
Anyone who has seen outlook revocation requests knows to look in their inbox for an embarrassing e-mail. Yet, this doesn't mean that distributed revocation is an impossible problem: on the contrary, I think it's getting more important as people realize how much online information is out there. In a sense it's the "real" online privacy (instead of group access control that Facebook and Diaspora want you to think is privacy).
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Yet, this doesn't mean that distributed revocation is an impossible problem: on the contrary, I think it's getting more important as people realize how much online information is out there. A moments thought should show that distributed revocation is inherently impossible except in an air-tight "trusted computing" environment. Such an environment may be possible to construct but that construction has been shown to quite difficult at the least (especially resulting in systems with exponentially inferior performance, turning O(1) problems into O(n^2) problems, "The Xanadu Project" had conceived of the before CERN but floundered on this problem, etc). Moreover, such an environment is so undesirable that I, along with quite a few others, would actively work to prevent it coming into existence. "The Right To Read" etc... ...and of course how important some unspecified group of people are coming to see distributed revocation as being itself has no relation to how possible it is.

anthonyb 16y ago

It's not going to happen. If you want an open, distributed protocol like email, it shouldn't be a surprise that it'll work like email. Perhaps you'll have a small undo window like GMail, but once it's gone out - it's gone out. I don't think that anyone who's seen lamebook is going to expect that semi-public information will stay that way.