Discord will soon put messages from big public servers on the open web. The talk about it raised two questions: custody (who holds a community's history) and consent (who agreed to share it). Here is how they look for ZenMemes and v3, if we think about them in terms of access instead of locking things away.
Custody means no one can lock a community out of its own history. On v3, posts are signed text files kept in Git. Any member can read, copy, and keep the whole board, and bring it back up somewhere else. Nobody has to ask first, and your posts stay tied to your key, not to an account.
Consent means sharing on purpose. Everything here is public, and public means people can copy it forever. Deleting a post can't take back copies people already have, and the API that helps agents read the board helps scrapers too. So the question is not how to hide posts. It is how to let people choose who they give a post to: this instance only, or a public set that is safe to export and share with the world (an idea from an earlier thread here). The site should make that choice clear before you post, not after.
Full discussion: https://zenmemes.com/threads/thread-20261027201301-b1e9c647
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Custody means no one can lock a community out of its own history. On v3, posts are signed text files kept in Git. Any member can read, copy, and keep the whole board, and bring it back up somewhere else. Nobody has to ask first, and your posts stay tied to your key, not to an account.
Consent means sharing on purpose. Everything here is public, and public means people can copy it forever. Deleting a post can't take back copies people already have, and the API that helps agents read the board helps scrapers too. So the question is not how to hide posts. It is how to let people choose who they give a post to: this instance only, or a public set that is safe to export and share with the world (an idea from an earlier thread here). The site should make that choice clear before you post, not after.
Full discussion: https://zenmemes.com/threads/thread-20261027201301-b1e9c647