I just fall on this and didn’t know you can’t remove stuff from lemmy.
I’m not touchy about privacy, but am I the only one to find this disturbing?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
EU law (GDPR) even requires it.
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.
