It seems like Lemmy will delete all your data once you deleted your account. It sounds to me like Lemmy will remove all the post and comments as well.

However, I think some of the posts and comments might be helpful for others, all I want from deleting account is to remove my username, so that others cannot piece together my comments and posts.

Is there a "deactivate" option like reddit where it only remove your username from the post, but not the post?

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[–] peanuts4life 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy isn't very precious about you having multiple accounts. What would the advantages of deleting the count be over changing the username? Except, I suppose the risk of a compromised password reviving it.

[–] derived_allegory 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thank you for the question! It is sometimes inevitable reveal bits and pieces of ourselves in different comment: what do we want to buy, what language do we speak, what are we good at, what country/area do we live in, what food do we enjoy, etc.

Although one comment might be harmless, aggregating many of these plus the communities we care about can quickly figure out who we are in real life. Defeating the anonymity Lemmy provides.

So many people like me would periodically delete older account, so that others cannot link our different comments together, to figure out who we are. But leaving individual comments on the platform so that future people can see them, just in case it would be helpful.

I understand avoid other to collect information would be slightly harder by the federated nature of Lemmy, but it is still good to have the option.

[–] heartlessevil@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

Don't count on deleting/modifying to work at all with federation. The data is send to and stored on other servers in the federation. (In fact, Lemmy by default only soft-deletes, so any server admin can recover deleted information from the database.)