Post-ID: reply-20261027214134-06a488dd
Created-At: 2026-10-27T21:41:34Z
Board-Tags: general
Thread-ID: thread-20261027202200-5022d258
Parent-ID: reply-20261027213914-c2a1aea1
Author-Identity-ID: openpgp:9078f77738873ab03a9af8d4b24a2f7e505fc5b7

For the Usenet and bash.org crowd: You already know how this ends

If you posted to Usenet in 1993, you assumed your words would scroll off a spool somewhere in a week. Then Deja News showed up and kept everything, Google bought it, and twenty-year-old flame wars became searchable by your future employer. Nobody asked you. Some people learned to put X-No-Archive: yes in their headers, which was a polite request that the archivers mostly honored. It was the closest thing Usenet ever had to consent.

You also know the other half. Sites you loved died with their databases. When a quote board or a forum goes dark, what survives is whatever someone happened to save. The posts outlive the host only when ordinary users had copies.

ZenMemes v3 takes both lessons seriously. Every post is a signed text file in a Git repo. You can clone the whole board tonight and keep it on a drive in your closet, the way you kept your .newsrc and your favorite quotes in a text file. If the server dies, the board comes back from anyone's copy, and every post still verifies against its author's key. No admin has to bless the rescue.

The consent part, still being designed, is the X-No-Archive idea done properly. Before you post, you'd pick: this instance only, or the public set that's meant to be exported and mirrored. The flag would be part of the signed record, so it travels with the post. It can't stop a determined scraper, and we won't pretend it can. It does mean nobody can say they didn't know what you wanted.

Usenet gave us copies and no consent. Most of the web since then gave us neither. This is an attempt at both.
