EDIT: Thanks to @solidgrue, I realize ActivePub (the protocol under Lemmy) actually support content deletion. It's mostly to the instances to choose to honor it or not, which make sense.

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[–] solidgrue 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's like email: after you send it off your own MTA, you have no control over what happens to the copy at the far end, or any other MTAs it happens to traverse.

ActivityPub does distribute updates to posts, including delete intents, but instances are not bound to honor it. Same as how recalling an email isn't guaranteed to work.

Disturbing? I'd say more that it's sobering. I think it should prompt people to think more carefully about their accountability for what and how they post. I also may come to change this opinion over time.

[–] Narann 5 points 1 year ago

ActivityPub does distribute updates to posts, including delete intents

Oh! I thought that it was a limitation of the ActivePub protocol to not support delete intents because of “the Internet never forget”.

but instances are not bound to honor it.

Yes, totally make sense.

[–] Candelestine 12 points 1 year ago

The Fediverse is like the internet, it is not one thing, but lots of individual "things" linked together. You can theoretically, legally ask each one to delete your stuff.

But there is no single giant tech company you can ask that controls the whole thing and can delete content over the whole thing. This is part of the point.

[–] zloubida 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I tend to agree. We should be able to delete what we wrote.

Still, it's fun to see people criticizing Lemmy for that on Reddit, which does the same thing.

[–] EyesEyesBaby 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

EU law (GDPR) even requires it.

[–] sudneo 2 points 1 year ago

It is more complex than this. The responsibility falls on the one handling the data, but then each other entity who got this data becomes also a data processor, and should be asked to delete the data. In practice it means you should request deletion to every instance who got your content through federation. This is because the instance you use has no control over what others can do, including ignoring the deletion request. I remember Dessalines mentioned that the best way is to edit all the comments. Either way, we should work on developing proper privacy policies and work together with fedi developers to provide a bulletproof privacy experience.

[–] StarManta 5 points 1 year ago

Anything that is posted that is publicly viewable on the internet, cannot be deleted. Full stop, end of sentence. It may be deleted from the original service, but it will have been archived by services elsewhere within hours (or more likely minutes).

Any service that promises the ability to delete public posts is selling false privacy.

[–] RandomPickle13 4 points 1 year ago

Would this not be similar to expecting an email to be deleted of everyones server when you delete it on your local server?

Honestly, I would find it more disturbing if I run a server/instance, and someone could delete something on my server/instance.

As for GDPR, I guess you would have to request the data to be deleted for every instance it got send to. I don't think it would be on the creator of the software/protocol to enable something like this for the entire fediverse (agian same as email). I'm not an expert however, so take this with a grain of salt.

[–] j891319 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Always best to assume online that anything you post anywhere is imortalized forever. However for a decentralized platform I hope this is just negligence and not malice.

Edit: other comments using the email analogy explain this is just due to decentralization making global deletion impractical.

[–] ThatsTheJoke 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah I'm one of them, deleted my account, fuck Spez.