In my opinion it’s unreasonable to think anything can truly be deleted in a federated system. Even if the official codebase is updated to do complete deletion & overwrite, it’s impossible to prevent some bad actor from federating in a fork that just ignores deletion requests.

Seems sensible to just not post anything that you don’t want to be available for the lifetime of the internet.

It’s a work in progress.

If I wanted privacy, I wouldn’t be browsing online.

I’m at a loss. You’re saying that things that you said publicly are private? Or you’re saying that they become private because you delete your account? Assume you dox someone. I need to find out if that happened. As an admin I’d be able to see that

1. you
2. publicly posted
3. their data

I would need to be able to provide this to authorities if they provided needed legal documentation. Why do you think that privacy dictates you should be able to commit a crime, and get away with it by deleting your account?

Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible

This is a negative behavior by Lemmy, in my opinion. Deleted comments should be purged after some time. Tildes does the same thing - I think with 30 days?

Deleted account usernames remain visible too

These should be replaced with some random string of characters or something like DeleteUser<numberhere> or something.

Anything remains visible on federated servers!

This is just a concession of federation.

When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server

This is an issue, too, in my opinion.

Opposite to Instagram or Facebook, on Lemmy or Mastodon you can create an anonymous account. Yes it will be logged (normal public internet), but you won’t be treacable. The UI doesn’t have any tracking scripts, and many instances don’t require an email even to sign up. Use the Tor browser to spoof your IP.

The illusion of Privacy is Mastodon (or social media in general)

There’s a reason why when you go to “private mentions” on Mastodon, this appears:

While yes, we should be able to delete our content if we want, but it’s a bit naive to think there could be true privacy in any decentralised social media platform.

There’s a reason why one of the think people tell you when you come to the fediverse is not to share personal and sensible information.

The only decentralised social media that has some level of privacy is Matrix, and that’s why it has it’s own protocol and only federates within/between its own servers.

This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of digital privacy. You can never be guaranteed that data is deleted, just like you can never be guaranteed that someone has “forgotten” something. It doesn’t matter what any entity claims they are doing under the hood, you have to assume they can’t be trusted. That’s not an expectation you can have, and not something privacy advocates are asking for.

I’m posting this comment publicly, and there’s nothing stopping any random user (or non-user) from scraping this lemmy instance and archiving the data themselves. I know that when I post it. Same for reddit, raddle, any mastodon instance, etc. I can copy the text and usernames of everyone involved in that raddle thread and do whatever I want with it, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me.

To think otherwise reminds me of that first day on the internet kid meme. “I deleted my comments off of their servers, hah, they’ll never get them now!”

What I can demand is: if I send a message directly to another party, I want to be able to verify that that party and ONLY that party can read the message (end-to-end encryption). I can also demand that they not require me to dox myself to them, that they not run weird js-based fingerprinting/port scanning processes on my system/network, and that I am allowed to connect to their services through a VPN should I so choose.

I understand the impulse but the way some people get so hung up on trying to make a way to permanently and universally delete posts made on public facing social media and framing it as a “privacy” issue feels kinda like saying something you regret on mic at a town hall and being mad that you can’t permanently delete the memory of it from the minds of everyone present, and claiming that they violated your privacy by remembering it

i mean raddle is a site that has an anti doctor post pinned in the mental health community … like c’mon I and many others need medicine to survive and you are encouraging anti-psychiatrist posting, Church of Scientology levels of anti-medicalist posting

Not sure what the point of “Mastodon’s” opinion is? Firstly, Mastodon is pretty big and decentralised, and it has no-one who really speaks on behalf of all its users. Lemmy is not a privacy central network like a direct messenger service. It never claimed to be privacy centric as far as I know. The point is to share posts in communities, and the more that see them, the better.

But it is federated which means posts do get shared to other servers everywhere, and deleting those is not as easy as for a centralised server. Whatever I post on any sharing type service, I consider to be public.

That’s a non issue. You just cannot expect to be able to delete anything you post on the internet. Even the great reddit with the awesome deletion feature cannot help you. You might be able to delete your comment there, but there is https://www.unddit.com/ https://archive.is/ https://web.archive.org/ and many others, where your comment will still be available.

It is reasonable that people should be able to delete their posts / comments. However I don’t see how is this related to “privacy”. How can something you post on a public forum be private?

So, I was born in the late 90’s - I don’t know if they still have “computer literacy” as a core course in schools these days, but they did when I was going through K-12 (or, well K-9… once you were in high school they assumed you knew the basics of how to use a computer, and had more advance courses).

One of the very first things we learned about the internet is that once you put something on the internet, there is no way to take it back. At the time, uploading pictures to the “cloud” and such wasn’t really a thing so we learnt this by using email: Once you’ve sent an email to someone, you cannot “unsend” it. You can kindly ask the other party to delete the copy of the email without opening it, but you cannot guarantee that the email wasn’t saved on another computer, or saved somewhere else along the route between your computer and the receiver’s computer. Clicking the send button was taught to us as “etching your letter into stone”.

Because of this, I’ve always (or at least, as far as I can remember) made sure that anything I put on the internet, or even “put into digital form” (such as even writing something in a file on your computer - you can recover deleted files from a hard drive unless you really put in the effort to actually erase it… there is a huge difference between erasing a file, and marking it as “deleted”) is something that I’m okay being tied with me forever. I’m sure if you looked hard enough, you could find me participating on message boards as a young teenager - and to that I just say “Oh well”. Is some of it probably very cringe-inducing and embarrassing? I have no doubt.

(This is also why you should take extreme caution when talking about say, your friend, on the internet - if you post something about them on the internet, you’re condemning them to this same exact thing)

Now funnily enough, as far as I understand the ActivityPub protocol, it is for all intents and purposes the exact same as email in this regard. Once you’ve sent something, there are no “take backs”. All you can do is kindly ask others to delete their copy, and that comes with zero guarantees. If I had a mastodon server, and someone deletes their toot - I could take down my server and my server would never receive that delete request. Or, just simply change the source code of the Mastodon instance on my server to straight up ignore deletion requests.

Would it be nice for Lemmy to have a way to actually delete your content? Sure. But that’s not technically feasible, and personally (as controversial as it may seem) I would rather Lemmy not try to give you the false sense that everything was completely gone forever. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be able to delete your account off a Lemmy instance, but it shouldn’t come with an option that says “Check here to remove your data/media from all federated instances” because Lemmy/no one can promise that, and I really hate it when software (or really anyone/anything) attempts to make a promise in bad-faith knowing that they can’t possibly ever uphold it.

Anyone who thinks Reddit is “better” than Lemmy in this regard probably doesn’t realize that Reddit is making a claim they can’t keep. The most obvious example of this is all of these subreddits that have gone dark? You can bring up most of their posts on the Wayback Machine or Google Cache. That would be the case regardless of whether they were set to private, or even if they were just straight up “deleted”.

We really should not be setting the belief for people that there exists a way to completely nuke a piece of data off the internet, because you cannot make a guarantee of that being the case.

After reading some more comments, I think I came up with a good analogy to explain this issue, and I wanted to share.

Think of websites like a bar that also has an open mic.

Now, when I go to a bar, I don’t want to have to give the bouncers and staff my full name as well as my address. I also wouldn’t want them to know that I just came, for example, from a store where I was looking for a vacuum, and then have them warn a vacuum seller about it. A vacuum seller who is then going to sit next to me, while I’m trying to have a drink, and show me a pamphlet regarding the “amazing vacuum” he has for sale.

Ideally, I can also look for a bar that will allow me to come in costumed and not show my face. Or I could ask the bar to delete footage of me at some point, and to not store my ID if I do have to show it to a bouncer at the entrance.

All of that is relatively feasible and within the realm of reason; and all of that are things that privacy advocates might advocate for.

However, what is not feasible, or within the realm of reason, or what privacy advocates tend to advocate for, is the ability for me to willingly go up on stage, say something on the mic which I immediately regret, and then ask everyone present to forget it ever happened and delete any footage they might have of it. No reasonable person would ask for something like that, because it is not a reasonable request.

That is how regular websites work. With federated websites, that becomes enhanced; it’s like if the bar you’re in has a camera pointed at the microphone, and transmits both video and audio directly into several other bars. So when you go up to that mic, you better make sure you’re okay with what you are saying being made public and available to anyone.