So I had this joke idea of “they’ll just start showing the ads to the AIs”, but the more I thought about it the more it started to sound less like a joke. Imagine if someone figured out how to cram ads into the AI training models and it skewed the outputs. Why astroturf when you can train the AIs to astroturf for you. This is some black mirror shit and now I’ve made myself a bit depressed.
Less depressing example. A country (I think it was India but my memory is hazy and I’m too lazy to go google it right now) had a problem with a certain venomous snake. They decided to offer a bounty for every snake corpse brought to them. The goal was to incentivise people to hunt snakes. What actually happened was people started breeding the snakes to turn in for the bounties. They realized the program wasn’t working and cancelled it at which point the breeders dumped their snakes into the wild making the whole situation even worse.
So CAP theorem says you can have a distributed system with at most two of Consistent, Available, or Partition tolerant. I haven’t looked too closely into the federation implementation of Mastodon but I suspect they opted for Available and Partition tolerant (as Consistent and Partition tolerant would mean the entire network goes down when one node does, while Consistent and Available would mean once any node lost contact with the network it could never again rejoin). Since consistency is not guaranteed (and provably can’t be) there is absolutely no way to guarantee that deleting something from one instance will remove it from all instances even allowing for a very generous time span.
TL;DR: You’re not just right, you’re mathematically right.
Next time I need to explain what bikeshedding is I’m just going to point to this article.
Safe and private? Nope absolutely impossible. If you don’t care about privacy at all pretty much the only way to do it is to have your government issue you a unique hardware token and require that to access the internet and it shares your unique ID with the website. It’s not 100% impossible to spoof an identity as you could borrow/steal someone elses token, but if they were secured with a pin/password or basic biometric it would become significantly harder.