So say I make an account on lemmy.world and post a bunch of stupid comments around other instances then decide to delete my account because I’m ashamed of them. After I delete my account, a copy of all those comments I made on other instances remain on those instances as a “shadow copy.” There isn’t any way to actually delete them all. The copies of the comments/posts on your home instance will be deleted
tldr: Don’t say stupid shit on other instances you’ll regret later! They never leave that instance!
Why YSK: so you can think carefully about what to comment and post.
I migrated from beehaw. You can see my previous post history here: DM_Gold@beehaw.org
I think the streamlined version of what you’re saying is: don’t say stupid shit
(That’s actually a good rule of thumb for irl too)
But stupid shit is all I know!
That’s true.
But, everyone should be working from the assumption that whatever they put on the internet is there forever anyway.
Everyone should also know that anything on the internet can completely disappear at any time without warning
And people are trying to remove their Reddit history now.
Don’t post anything to the internet that you don’t want to exist forever.
Could you please add a “Why YSK:” as stated in rule #2? Thank you!
Can’t you edit those comments?
I think after recent example of beehaw defederation it’s possible that after instance defederates you lose control over your comments as they don’t synchronise anymore.
Yeah it seems like this only applies after defederation but idk
Yes you should be able to edit the comments. But those edited comments will remain in those other servers. Also if you make a ton of comments do you really want to edit them all?
I guess you could automate it.
Will I always be talking rubbish? 🤷
Updates and deletes should federate, but with defederation those actions may not spread to all servers.
Regardless, you should assume any message on Lemmy is stored on thousands of servers. Many of them will not even be part of a social media network, they could just as easily be gathering data to train machine learning models. Deleted messages also aren’t purged for a while (they weren’t purged at all a few versions back).
Once a message leaves your computer, you lose control over it. Once it gets replicated to other servers, it gets even worse. This can be a powerful anti-censorship measure, but it can also cause problems.
If you’re an EU citizen, you could try filing a GDPR deletion request. If they refuse, contact your local DPA for options. You still won’t be able to delete your information from servers that you can’t find, but it’ll get your messages removed from Google at least.
If you’re not an EU citizen, you can still ask the server admins nicely. That’s even less reliable, but I think most reasonable admins would agree to purging your stuff. Data replicated to some extremist instances may not get deleted this way, but it’s worth a shot.
There are issues like this. And Lemmy doesn’t seem to delete cached content after some time. So text content takes something like 25gB just after 1 month on my instance. And it’s not because of what we post, but just because of cached posts from communities on other instances.
So there should be an enhancement on this with the ability to delete automatically cached content after some time.
