this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
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In my understanding, deleting (and moderation) are pretty much unsolved mysteries on this platform.
For example, last I heard, an administrator has to drop into a command line to delete media from removed posts, otherwise they'd still be accessible if the URL was known. (Think illegal material.)
Filtering is similarly done at the client end, so that's fun.
Note that I'm not associated with the source code, only as a user and am repeating things I've observed, read, or have been told. YMMV.
Perhaps it's worth joining an EU instance in case this creeps me out too much. I'd like to be able to use my right to be forgotten
Good luck with that. Once the post federates out, the host instance can request for deletion, but any federated instances that receives the content doesn’t necessarily have to follow that request. They could easily modify their instance to not delete, they may reactivate the content from moderation log, they might have backup strategies that involves retaining data (for their own local legal reasons), etc etc.
It’s probably best to assume any content that you post on Lemmy are out of your control and will live for much longer than you’d expect.
This is not limited to just Lemmy but any federated systems. So regardless centralized corporation behind the service, or an open federated system; one way or another, whatever you post out there, its no longer yours to control.
Not just federated systems, things like the Wayback Machine exist too, web crawlers, people can save websites too (every web browser has a save option), or you can self host an archiving crawler if you want to backup a certain website, data hoarders exist.