Or maybe just stop?!? [LWN.net]

Or maybe just stop?!?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 11:26 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Or maybe just stop?!? by marcH
Parent article: Open-source Discord alternatives

> Would you want all your _oral_ conversations to be systematically recorded and archived? Some yes, most not.

This would depend entirely on type of archive. Would I want to have them all recorded and made accessible to me? Absolutely. Would I want to have my call to bank support be published on the open web? Probably not.

I don't see how archival makes things worse if it doesn't violate privacy settings.

Yes, sometimes keeping things private is safer by keeping talks “off record”, but if I had a guarantee that what's private would stay private… my memory is not perfect, damn it! Gimme these archives!

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Or maybe just stop?!?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 19:44 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

This would depend entirely on type of archive. Would I want to have them all recorded and made accessible to me? Absolutely. Would I want to have my call to bank support be published on the open web? Probably not.

There are definitely legal implications to inherently ephemeral means of communication. If you're ever involved in a lawsuit (in the USA, at least), the other party can demand you turn over all communications that might possibly be related to the suit. Your ephemeral media can't be turned over, but there's a good chance some of your ephemeral conversations will be referenced in a permanent medium. Depending on how that happens, it could create the impression that you're deliberately moving sensitive conversations to ephemeral media to avoid creating incriminating records. If the judge thinks you're deliberately hiding something that way, they can apply a variety of penalties, like telling the jury they can assume whatever was said in the ephemeral medium was bad for your case.