this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
14 points (81.8% liked)

Fediverse

18916 readers
7 users here now

A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

Getting started on Fediverse;

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml
wakest@lemmy.ml
14
Serious Question - Is the ActivityPub deletion problem a fatal flaw? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 2 days ago by RideAgainstTheLizard@slrpnk.net to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've been using federated social media for a while now and I recently considered setting up an instance for my local community as a sort of Facebook alternative. However, as I thought about it, I wondered if ActivityPub's deletion problem (i.e. if a user deletes their content on their server it doesn't guarantee the content being deleted on other servers) is a fatal flaw. I worry that it would be difficult to secure buy-in from people if they were made aware of this issue, which they have the right to. It does make me wonder if the ATProtocol will be the better protocol if and when it becomes open source.

I'm curious as to other drivers users' thoughts. While it is an issue that we may be happy to live with given the numerous other benefits ActivityPub provides, is it a flaw that will ultimately prevent wide scale adoption?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 16 points 2 days ago

This is not so much an "ActivityPub problem" as it is just how things work when you move something from point A to point B. You can't unsend an email (or physical mail) or untell a secret.

The idea that you can just delete something on a whim is an illusion created by the centralized silo networks, and it's not even true those cases as it's generally a soft delete, and archived by other means anyway.