Permission and regime
This system republishes other people’s work. Everything on this page exists because of that.
Two different questions
They are easy to confuse and they are independent:
A drawn edge is not a permission. The panel draws flows without consent as broken, not connected. If they looked the same, this panel would be a false promise with better typography: somebody would look at a graph full of arrows and believe everything was authorised.
What a consent looks like
It is not a flag. It is a record with who, when, for which destinations and, optionally, with what evidence.
cuentas_destino names accounts, not networks. Two earlier versions failed
for the same reason: they stored 'mastodon'. With two Mastodon accounts, that
permission enabled both, and there was no way to consent to one and not the
other — a permission wider than what the person asserted. The per-network
alcance still exists, but derived from the accounts, not the other way
round.
An old, per-network permission is not translated into a selection of accounts. When the permissions panel opens, a consent that does not name accounts does not appear checked: showing it as if it named accounts would display something more precise than what the person said, and saving on top of that would turn their broad permission into a narrow one without anyone deciding so.
Granting and revoking
Revoking does not unpublish. What already went out stays online, and taking it down is a person’s work. The revocation dialog says so before it is pressed — staying quiet would let someone believe that revoking undoes what was done.
The regime: what happens with a loose link
There is a case that does not fit the subscribe-with-permission model: somebody sends a loose link to an Instagram post over Telegram, to have it replicated. There is no subscription, there is no recorded consent.
The decision taken was to allow it with attribution and marking, not silently.
Attribution is a CHECK, not a convention. The constraint
items_atribucion_obligatoria says: if the regime is
atribucion_sin_permiso, permalink cannot be null. Such an item, without
a link to the original, cannot be written to the database. Not through a bug,
not through a script, not by hand.
Where it shows up
Three places, and each one answers a different question:
| Where | What it answers |
|---|---|
| A notice on publishing | “Something just went out under this regime” |
| The history filter | “What did we publish this way?” — the question of the day a complaint arrives |
| The per-row marker | “This one here, how did it get in?” |
Why the filter is a question and not just another column. A value per row is seen when somebody is already looking at that row. The day a complaint arrives, “what did we publish without recorded consent?” has to have an answer on a screen, not in an SQL query written in a hurry.
What the attribution regime does NOT enable
It only applies to the loose link, which is a deliberate act by a person pasting a URL. Subscribing to an account —including public accounts read through a browser— does require recorded consent. It is not a shortcut for skipping permission: it is the recognition that sharing an already identified link is a different thing from subscribing to somebody’s material.