No, it's just open free for the taking by anyone who decides to spin up their own instance, or to anyone who decides to scrape from an instance frederated with yours without robots.txt set against web scrapers. Hosters could even intentionally break federation to prevent deletions from syncing.

I love lemmy, but privacy is not one of its features.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago

Any script kiddie can scrape the entirety of Lemmy, with the exception of direct/private messages. robots.txt is merely a request, with no enforcement capability.