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by Esteban (u/estebanabaroa.eth) | 23mo ago
it's technically possible to implement, but what is the use case? who would have the keys to decrypt? it would be very wasteful to force everyone reading a public board to download your encrypted posts that they can't read. we do have private/encrypted boards/communities planned at some point, and those will also be fully P2P, but these wont be wasteful, because if you don't have the keys to decrypt, you don't download the content of the community. the private communities will also have the option to posting unencrypted content, so it will be possible to build apps like patreon for gated content with free previews. the owner of the community will control the settings of what is encrypted and who has control over viewing. I'm not sure there is a use case for authors being able to encrypt posts that community owners can't decrypt, they wouldn't be able to moderate posts and the design of plebbit is based on the fact that the community owner can moderate and stop spam in the community. for private communication between 2 people, or between a small group, one of them can be the community owner.

2 direct replies

i concede it may be wasteful and I think private communities will be a useful feature. as for the usecase one that comes to mind is a ‘board within a board’ where there is a layered conversation. you could have the encrypted messages only downloaded by those signaling or with the decryption key. it would essentially allow for conversation(s) alongside the primary conversation in a more layered and private way. Small social networks could discuss public information in a parallel or "in-thread group private message." i can see plenty of practical use in this. in short, a conversation alongside a conversation which i consider an innovative way of communicating - it's like private messages viewable by intended recipients across the plebnet. as far as value alone of communication I see that as a underdeveloped yet high potential use case. another use case is information markets aka an information exchange. a sub owner might run a board as an information exchange. no one will use his information market if the owner gets full access to all encrypted information. in this use case, the post might contain a message and an encrypted message that is conditionally decrypted (through trusted reputation or via smart contract or another mechanism) when x condition is met (i.e. an individual purchases the decryption key or a group of individuals crowdfund the release of the information or a certain real world event takes place as registered by an oracle). (Ill have to figure more thought to this, I suppose this could also be done without building it into the protocol, or a fusion one and two, your patreon example but across all subs and across the plebnet). p.s. i would pause to call it spam, tho i suppose it could be if unwelcomed by protocol design or community. if it's encrypted and can't be decrypted without the key, and these messages are at least hidden without the key, then moderation isn't really necessary, is it?