this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Privacy
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Privacy enthusiast and software developer here. I would not consider that post an "article". It is an alarmist mess.
Point 3 is so vague as to be useless, and its link doesn't clarify at all, so I won't try to address it.
To points 1, 2, & 4:
As far as I can tell, Lemmy does in fact federate deletes. If those deletes are not being honored, then the problem lies not in the Lemmy network, but in one implementation of it, which can be fixed.
If Lemmy's code is hiding posts instead of deleting them, you could submit a change request to address it. Chances are there's another way to accomplish whatever goal is behind the current behavior.
You could also write (if you're a developer) or sponsor (if you aren't) an alternative implementation. Make yours fully and immediately delete, and make it otherwise good, and it could become the dominant software for running Lemmy instances.
If your concern is with the Lemmy developers' ethical positions, you wouldn't be the first, but distancing yourself from them doesn't require abandoning the network. You can simply use an alternative implementation (e.g. Kbin) or join communities that aren't hosted on lemmy.ml. That's one of the great benefits of the network: no single person or server controls it.
I strongly believe that public discourse is healthier on decentralized communication services. For link sharing and conversation, I don't know of another platform that comes close to Lemmy's chances of success. It has flaws, but nothing that can't be fixed over time. And we need one now. The important thing is to get people using it; build the communities. That will make the time investment required to improve it worthwhile.
Regarding privacy:
Let's try to remember that it is not possible to revoke something that has been made public, on any platform. Bots exist. Caches exist. Web crawlers. Intelligence agencies. Archives. Screen shots. Backups. The closest we can come is to encourage people on the network to honor deletes, and hope the remaining copies don't turn up at an embarrassing moment.
And as always (even before the internet), it's probably a good idea to think about our words before publishing them to the public.