There’s no security reason to do so as forks would be permanently divergent. So all it would do is change a hard fork choice incentive from ‘what I prefer’ to ‘what I think the majority is going to prefer’ and (in practice) prevent the existence of a minority fork.
In addition it could potentially lead to a stall in the network at a (controversial) fork time as validators could prefer to pay an offline penalty just to see what fork the remaining majority chooses.
For these reasons I don’t think deposits should be slashed across hard forks. Are they going to?
If we want to make hard forks “safe” then we could require hard forks to change the format of signatures or add a chain ID into signatures; this way it would be possible for validators to continue being validators of both chains after a fork takes place.
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I think it is very important from a governance perspective to make sure that hard forking (rule changes) are always available and easy for all forks. This is the final check/balance by a disenfranchised group against the majority and to only thing stopping a blockchain from turning into mob (majority) rule.
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