Amen. It's a strange combination indeed, and a reason why I took down the SSB "pub" I was self-hosting on NetBSD on an OrangePi Zero for some friends, back in 2020.

I don't want to store other people's dataz even if encrypted, and I certainly don't want to have everything I shared being available for eternity, or to have to switch identities periodically.

If you don't want to store people's data, then an SSB "room" server is the option, and in fact is the best type of server currently serving the SSB network. More info here https://www.manyver.se/faq/admin-room

Once you share something on the internet, its potentially there forever. You can only make it more difficult to be found. If its controversial, the chance of it getting copied (e.g. screenshotted) is bigger. There's a name for it too: Streissand effect.

That's why Snapchat provides a false sense of security. On a rooted smartphone the privacy feature of self destruct does not work, and there's always the analog hole. There's extensions for platforms like Reddit which show supposedly moderated/deleted content.

In snapchat, you're sending messages to friends, or at the very least individuals, who you trust have not rooted their phone to log messages.

Anything put to the public internet is there forever because antisocial corporations and the few individuals who do not respect privacy can operate at scale.

Asking a normal person nicely to delete something almost always works though, especially if not deleting it is a hassle

This is a series of assertions, which I assume are backed by your own intuition, but they are neither arguments nor observations.

Maybe we just have a very different threat model?

Snapchat style messages completely solves:

- someone you trust now later becomes untrustworthy and would use old messages against you

- messages are stored on your phone and can be found by someone else later

neither of these can happen if deleting messages is not an expected and normal part of the protocol

it does not solve the problem of sending messages to someone who already wants to hurt you (ie. the public internet)

And that brought us to the world of a thousand broken links, threads becoming dead graveyards after a few months, and people archiving threads using screenshots. The current internet is terrible at archiving anything.

there is a big space between archiving anything and archiving everything.

I am not negative to the idea at all, there is probably interesting use cases where keeping (for audit or attribution or whatever other objective) such decentralized logs is useful. But some of these needs might be served eg. using git, whereas others might beyond the reach of users because (while its 2023) it is still a hassle to self-host

I would prefer a world where people only shared things they were confident would not be embarrassing or hurtful later. It wouldn't be as popular of course.... just wholesome and friendly.