If at some point you want to delete your account and have your posts and comments be gone, you better delete it all manually before you actually delete the account, because that deletion process does not really work as advertised.
For my main account on world (which runs an outdated lemmy version), it seemed like at least the account deletion was federated so that my user page was no longer browsable from other instances, but none of my posts, comments or images had been deleted, not even on the home instance.
The homie @MrKaplan@lemmy.world helped me by manually deleting my stuff, but it seems like that has only worked for the home instance, posts and comments seem to still be readable from other instances (except for some of the images that MrKaplan manually deleted too, but that was only possible up to a date not too far in the past because lemmy used to not associate user uploads with the accounts). So my old posts from the world account can be viewed just fine from other instances:
For other instances that are more up to date the process is even worse imo, while locally things seem to get deleted, federation does not seem to happen at all. For example you can still browse my deleted slrpnk or lemmee accounts from other instances just fine:
https://slrpnk.net/u/achtungdrempels@lemm.ee
https://lemm.ee/u/AchtungDrempels@slrpnk.net
Account deletion in piefed works kinda like the old lemmy system (as on lemmy.world), and nothing gets deleted except the user page (which also seems to get federated), the posts and comments stay up.
Thought this would be interesting to some, if i had known what a mess this would be (obviously expected some federation issues, just not like that), i would have manually deleted everything. I deleted all these accounts in December, maybe this has been addressed somehow in the meantime, personally i’d have trust issues in this process.
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Nothing is ever really deleted on the internet, especially if it was automatically replicated to dozens of other servers.
OP does have a point.
This isn’t really helpful.
My point is how could you ever count on deletion when the content is being federated?
Even if Lemmy devs made account deletion easy and cascade deletes your content, all it takes is one server run by an archivist and that content is never going away.
It seems inherently unfixable in a federated system, like trying to unsend an email.
My point is he’s not asking for it to be deleted from the entire internet.
You’re just here to jerk yourself off over “uhm, actually! nothing is ever deleted from the internet!” which also isn’t true.
This is such a goofy take. Yes, obviously you can never be 100% there isn’t some copy or archive laying somewhere, but wanting it to be deleted for 99% of the ways people would find it is reasonable. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
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Is that supposed to be sarcasm?
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I don’t see why people get so riled up in the comment section of this post.
Is the original post a legit psa? Definitely. Will this become problematic with European law at some point? Well at least it’s going to be interesting. Should we care? Seeing as lemmy development is partially funded by the European Commission, definitely! Should we care for altruistic reasons? Also definitely. This place is supposed to be better than the centralized corporate social media to its users, especially also regarding privacy. It’s good practice to set up new accounts every once in a while against doxing and seeing how much of the community on lemmy is built by people who are sensitive to their privacy this is sth we should respect.
Should we break down in squabbles here of one instance against another? Please, if I want to hear “all people from place x are bad” I’d just switch on an election debate. Show that your adults. Take your peers and their concerns here seriously. Make something out of it when people raise legit concerns. Thank you bonjour for bringing up this topic.
The fediverse is inherently a place where it’s a lot harder to delete anything than on non-federated platforms. It always will be because everything you post here is instantly copied to hundreds (if not thousands) of other servers. Some of them may be actively hostile and intentionally not respect deletions. Some of them may just be misconfigured or for another non-malicious reason fail to delete things.
So don’t post things on the fediverse that you think you might one day regret.
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So don’t post things on the fediverse that you think you might one day regret.
I think they meant this as general advice for all lemmings and not your particular post, which btw is very much appreciated.
Another reason why I suggest another instance than LW
Lemmy from 0.19.4 allows users to at least delete their uploaded images
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Seems better to be able to delete your uploads yourself than having to ask manual support from an admin
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You always seemed very defensive about any criticism against LW, I never understood why
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I thought you were leaving the platform?
Good luck, in any case
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He wasn’t dunking on LW. Its a pretty common critisism.
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I wonder if it might lead to some issues with European laws at some point
That’s so weird, because comment deletions do get federated (mostly)
When deleting the account did you mark the checkbox “Delete all posts, comments and uploaded images”? Lemmy.world is running an old version so its possible that this is missing. Without that it is expected that only the profile gets deleted, while content is still available.
As for federated account deletion this is implemented and covered by test cases and should work in theory. However it is always possible that there is a bug. It would be helpful if you could open an issue with exact steps to reproduce. Use enterprise.lemmy.ml and ds9.lemmy.ml to test the latest version.
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Originally account deletion would always delete your posts, comments and everything. This was changed in 0.19 to make the content deletion optional (otherwise a lot of posts and comments would disappear unnecessarily). Unfortunately we forgot to add the new option to the user interface for 0.19, but it was added probably around 0.19.4.
Its hard to say why the federation didnt work properly, maybe there was a network error, or a bug in older Lemmy versions that got fixed in the meantime. Or there is still a bug which only happens in some cases.
That’s why Lemmy is such a GDPR nightmare :(
Your account is not your posts. Why would one assume that deleting the account would remove the posts? When a person stops speaking the things they said do not become unsaid. When they die their actions don’t retroactively undo themselves.
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Asking out of genuine naivety, why do you do that?
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A reason why I never joined LW.
Lemmy.world is a trash instance.
But! Without it being the honey pot that draws all the dimwits/homophobes/transphobes/racists from elsewhere (same for whatever Hexbear/Chapo domain those dipshits have now) and keeps them there, I oppose defederating from them, we should only sandbox them so any comments they make stays on the .world domain.
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Yeah, although in my mind it’s pretty much always been like this.
People on the internet are eager to say “something” even if it doesn’t actually address the issue at hand.
It’s sad, but it gets easier to deal with once we stop expecting more.
I just read your entire post, so don’t know what the fuck you are on about my reading comprehension.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, but lemmy.world definitely does not condone what you’re saying.
I wish a had the patience to go through my post history and link you the countless discussions there I’ve had with those types of people there.
