I hear you. One of those ‘you shouldn’t have to pay for a service like this’ moments.

In a moment of weakness, I signed up for Incogni. I was getting 3/4 phone calls a day that weren’t leaving messages and it was getting overwhelming.

I will say, somewhat anecdotally because I’m too busy to crunch the numbers, but it doesn’t seem like the spam email, phone calls and text messages I get have dropped dramatically. My wife too.

Sarcasm?

I’m a white male, ssssoooooo

A pretty normal one?

Honestly, I don’t think they really understand why they’re there.

They’re in their twenties. Some of them are college students. I think at least one is a literal teenager.

Musk chose these children because they don’t have the life experience to understand the consequences of their actions.

Cut billions of dollars in aid to the poorest people in the world? Without having any authority to do it? An average person would stop and think “how many people are going to die from this?” Or, more selfishly, “what consequences will I face in the future if I do something so fundamentally evil?” Or, more practically, “is what I’m doing legal, and will Trump and Musk throw me under the bus and claim I acted without orders if I get criminally charged for this?”

These kids aren’t thinking about long-term consequences. They’re thinking “the richest man in the world chose me to transform America and I have to live up to his expectations”.

Blind loyalty. That’s it.

It’s why armies recruit men young.

Just public key cryptography. All your actual posts and comment history are already shared. What is missing is a way to authenticate yourself to anyone but your home server. If the protocol included every profile having a public key, you could then use that to authenticate to any server. And managing that private key is no more complicated than managing your private key in a block chain context.

Non public info like subscriptions is a bit more complicated, because there is an actual policy question of who you share it with. You would either need to make it publicly available, keep a copy yourself, or have your home instance give it to you/the other server at the time you want to migrate.

Nope, that could still be done with a regular database. Blockchain has no practical use case.

Nah, There’s other ways to store data while preserving confidentiality, integrity and availability that isn’t on the blockchain. Besides A public ledger connected to a specific profile could make it easier for the profile to be doxxed/fingerprinted.

Spitballing here but a service using simple key-pairs might be a better way to do this.

• Users generate a key pair client-side.

• Public key is stored on the server, acting as the user’s identity.

• To update their profile, users sign the request with their private key. (Data is signed/verified client side before submission)

• The server verifies the signature using the stored public key before edits can be made.

Because data signature/verification are done client side theoretically you don’t need a ledger, your client can enforce profile state. (Maybe an HMAC is sent with the verified data and there reverted periodically by the client)

Yeah it’s nice to be able to import your list of subscriptions at least. But for comment history, I guess it depends what you’re getting out of a place like this. On Reddit, I liked going back sometimes and seeing what I was posting a couple of years ago. Especially if it’s personal shit, or even old review posts for movies or whatever. I like having a stable online presence or identity with a history to refer to.

I’m new around these parts. First post, here goes:

Yeah why not. I sure hope they have OCR enabled

These are all on the same domain. I guarantee you they have extensive spam filters in place. “Flooding their inbox” will do nothing as the messages won’t even go to their inbox.

Yep, date of birth is 71 so it’s very unlikely to be an automatic initials+random number username.