Loomio
Tue 21 May 2013 5:31AM

Public Posts that Expire

BB Brent Bartlett Public Seen by 53

I think that having a feature that allows your public posts to expire would be very beneficial for Diaspora.

I've loved the concept of aspects as soon as I heard about them. But after using them for awhile, I became aware that they only took care of part of the problem. Posting publicly is problematic, because the whole internet can see it, and it's stored indefinitely. The way I see it, you have two options:

  1. Use your real name, and never post anything controversial in public. (BO-RING)
  2. Use a pseudonym, and post whatever you want. (But your friends can't find you...and if they're doing the same thing, you might not be able to find them. This, as I see it, negates one of the huge benefits of using a social network in the first place: finding people you know, but have lost contact with.)

Lately, I've been doing a little reading about Snapchat. I think that "spoilage" is a very interesting concept. Basically, it's the concept of having posts that "spoil" and are deleted after a certain period of time. I think that having this as an option for Diaspora's public posts could accomplish a couple of things:

*It would prevent the likelihood that a controversial post would come back to haunt you in (for example) a job interview. Of course, you could have settings for a post to expire never, or archive favorite posts so that only you could read them, or to turn off the feature entirely.

*By making posts temporary, you can allow users to do things they couldn't do before: like save images on your server. The disk space problem becomes much less of a big deal when the image will get deleted after a period of time (look at 4chan, for example).

BB

Brent Bartlett Sat 1 Jun 2013 12:43AM

@goob I'm not sure that this is as difficult as Jonne thinks. Libertree, which you've probably heard of, is another social network written in Ruby, and is similar to Diaspora in many ways. On the Libertree network, there are 3 degrees of public posting: to the node, to the entire network, and to the Internet. I don’t know what they did to implement this, but it didn’t seem like there was that much of a fuss about it. Maybe I’ll ask one of the devs when I get a chance.

TS

Tom Scott Sun 2 Jun 2013 5:18PM

gotta agree with @florianstaudacher here. It's absolutely possible and very likely that this won't work as elegantly as we think it will. Even Snapchat content, which is completely centralized and actually does delete off the main server (so no one else can view it), is still saved on your phone and can be accessed by anyone who obtains your phone and has the right equipment. We have sort of the opposite problem, after federating expired content how do we make sure all recipients have also deleted the content off their pods in the right amount of time?

I don't necessarily think we'll have "evil pods", but rather "shitty pods" that have not been configured correctly and therefore don't run the background workers to successfully kill this content in time.

I'm actually a big fan of @jasonrobinson's idea of being in control of what content you federate out, at all times. It would be cool if there was a way to "symlink" remote content to its source when your pod doesn't need it anymore, as well as remotely remove content you don't want on public pods anymore. If that system was set up, having "spoilage" on public diaspora posts would be as simple as queuing those HTTP requests.