hexbear

OpSec is when I can no longer read old effortposts by my favorite posters.

I'm glad you said this. I've mentioned it before but I am definitely one of these people who will often search hexbear for past information. I have (diagnosed) memory issues and will often be able to hold onto vague memories of something happening but not the important details so I like to check back on things like old threads.

And just in general, I will wonder about things like what were people's thoughts on a given issue here say 3 or 4 years ago? And then it turns out, who knows, these two threads with a couple hundred comments discussed it, but they're just bare bones among all the "deleted by creator" placeholders. Or I'll think "Hasn't some recent struggle session already been had before, how did it turn out then?" But again, it will turn out only a fraction of the comments are visible and the OP is deleted making it impossible to find out. Or there's a movie I want to watch or a game I want to play, what do my comrades here think of it? Damn, can't tell, only every 4th comment about it is still there and those makes no sense without the context.

Or even just that i want to learn more on some leftism-related topic. Since I've already learned so much here over time, hexbear is still the source I think of when there's a topic I want to understand better, one that if searched for, all the search engines will make impossible to find accurate information on, with any western means of finding out will be loaded with bullshit and propaganda. And thats where its really sad, because what could have been a great resource has been cleared from the site. For example, I wanted to know more about what leftists thoughts were on the Cultural Revolution, something i didn't know much about beyond the usual propaganda we hear. I found a couple long detailed threads about it, even a struggle that was undoubtedly fascinating. I say detailed, presumably they were detailed anyway, it seemed like they probably were, from what I could tell from the maybe 1 in 5 comments that were still there. Everything else was "deleted by creator." Of 200 hundred and something comment thread it was all unreadable really. Ironically there were comments thanking other users for the detailed list of resources they provided, resources I would have consulted if I could. But those resources were of course in a comment made by someone who had since wiped their account. Must have been a fascinating duscussion if i had been there to see it. Some of the deleted comments were made by users I remember and know had really deep and insightful things to say, now all wiped out. It's always so disappointing.

I understand people's desire to be careful and have good opsec and don't hold it against them. But it really does degrade the site and make it so that instead of being the excellent source of leftist information that it could be, it becomes closer to a discord server where the only purpose is the immediate conversations happening in the moment. I can't help but find that sad. Especially when I don't think it really does much to improve a person's opsec anyway. (If any fed or lea in general at any point wants this information on you, they can have it without issue regardless of whether you wiped your account. It might help you keep safer from the regular-people level of fash who might try to dox you or something, but for one, that's probably not all that likely to happen for the vast majority of posters and even if it does, they can only use the stuff that is really personally about you which you shouldn't be posting in the first place, but if you do, you can selectively delete just those personal comments rather than your entire account history.)

It's mostly because of these ressons that for a while I did use archive.ph to save some threads I thought were interesting, or threads I thought had bits of valuable information but were likely to get lost. But the captcha shenanigans the archiver sites require now make it less worth the effort so I haven't done that for a while. But anyone can go look at those and any other posts that people archived over the years, clearing your account isn't going to make any difference with that. Especially now with federation, people can archive from different instances so your hexbear post may still be archived, but only on a lemmy.ml url and you wouldn't know it if you only checked the archive for hexbear urls. That doesn't make hexbear any more usable as a repository of information (as I would like it to be) but it does mean that deleting your history here may not have the opsec benefit you thought it would. In other words, wiping your account still hurts this site, but doesn't really do what you hoped when you do it.

Posting things about yourself that are untrue (but not obviously so) can also help

Opsec on hexbear is just a meme at this point. It was used as a way to run away from criticism so many times that how to actually do it has been obfuscated

Deleting your posts doesn't completely remove them from the internet, but it does make it harder to dig through them. Reaching into an archive is more involved than just clicking a username and scrolling.

You're not gonna be hiding yourself from the feds or some particularly determined nerd, and the best defense is to not say shit in the first place, but it certainly doesn't count as "bad opsec" to sweep your posts under the rug.

It shouldn't be too difficult, I've made other shitty python scripts to do stuff with the API, I can whip up one in an hour? or something.

It surely supports it, because before we had federation the delete button used to just delete posts and comments but not the account

Comments you can always undelete

That isn't true anymore, they get deleted after 30 days.

It's still a fine idea to edit them, but I just wanted to correct it.

Nope. You're thinking of the

'Delete all posts, comments and uploaded images' checkbox when you click on Delete Account inside of account settings.

Without that being ticked the account will be deleted but not the posts/comments.

cant find that