this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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This is my number one wish as well. I'm well aware that people can archive or snapshot my comments/content, and the site can keep backup servers, and that we should assume that things we post online should be treated as if it were there forever, but no one can convince me that any of these situations is remotely comparable to not being able to delete my own public-facing content.
It's also the number one concern I've heard from people on reddit who are considering migrating to Lemmy, but are undecided.
I really wish they'd fix this.
Software engineer here. Historically we started not hard-deleting anything because sometimes software does bad things and we never want to accidentally delete anything that could be important since then the only way to undo it is to restore the database from a backup. So it's better/safer to literally not allow the application to ever delete anything from the database.
That being said, I could see an option in ActivityPub to delete comments, but with the distributed nature of Lemmy you would have to trust every server you federate with to listed to the protocol and delete the comments too since they are stored on the other servers as well.
Trust of federated servers isn’t the issue. We already trust federated servers to publish the text we wrote and not some alternative version the owner wanted us to say.
The problem is instance owners don’t even have the option to obey deletion requests. They want to help delete your content but they cannot.
The whole “what’s the point of building it if there’s a possibility one dude doesn’t obey the request” is whataboutism.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be able to hard delete comments, I'm just explaining why the Lemmy developers might not have started with hard-deleting comments. I agree with you we should have the option and it should propagate regardless of any instance settings.
My point in mentioning other servers not deleting your comments is that ActivityPub is an open standard. Technically someone can write a Lemmy competitor that federates with your instance and does not implement the hard deletion of comments. It's allowable under the protocol. That doesn't mean the feature isn't worth implementing, it just means there are caveats to "this comment disappears off the Internet forever" like we'd like.