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Comment by substack | Hacker News Reader

You don't need to trust the security of pubs. Validation of messages happens through cryptographic signing and public messages are public anyways. You also don't need to trust that pubs will be online much because your followers will also help host your content.

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> public messages are public anyways

Right, but someone I trust could have their message corrupted, no?

eg; some political leader intends to write "everybody vote for Alice" and it is modified to read "everybody vote for Carol". Is this possible?

(I generally trust FB not to do this because their business would suffer if they were caught, for example – not so with ephemeral pubs)

Each message includes a signature by its author of its content, so it can't be falsified (unless the author's key is compromised)

Nope, there's proper crypto in place to prevent this (each user has their messages signed with a keypair)

So, if I post a GB worth of diary entries, who ends up caching it by default? Just my followers? People I follow? Pubs I connect to?

> So, if I post a GB worth of diary entries, who ends up caching it by default? Just my followers? People I follow? Pubs I connect to?

your followers, their followers, and their followers (assuming everyone is using the default replication settings). These may include pubs or people you follow. If you are able to connect to a pub then most likely it is willing to replicate your feed.

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