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I've seen this "deletion is not guaranteed on lemmy" warning shouted loudly and often by a few individuals over the past month or two, mostly on reddit. It makes no sense in context, because deletion is not guaranteed on reddit, either. Or on any other public forum.
For the record, lemmy devs addressed it in a discussion here.
I'm starting to think it's propaganda sponsored by reddit, hoping to scare people out of leaving.
Just to add more information or context to your answer, this site exists, so instead of people arguing about "Lemmy sucks on privacy" or "This place is a hell hole for anonymity", maybe people should rethink about what they're going to write.
Agreed with everything you said. The anti-Lemmy posts over there are starting to smell like astroturf. Although who knows, a lot of it follows similar anti-Mastodon posts I've also read there, so either some people really dislike federated social media that much or Twitter astroturfers were busy on Reddit after the blue bird was "stunned" by Elon.
I'm starting to think it's propaganda sponsored by reddit, hoping to scare people out of leaving.
If so, that would be rich. Reddit has been drawing fire for actively "un-deleting" content.
Good link
Reddit is required by EU law to delete all of your data if you ask them to (and you're an EU citizen). I suspect it's much harder to do on the fediverse, though in theory they're subjected to the same law.
Reddit can only delete their own copy, not the copies made by other parties. That's the reality of public media.
Not in theory, in practice.
But as ono points out, I can screenshot or copy paste whatever I want, what is anyone going to do with that?
GDPR and the right to be forgotten is extremely hard to apply to any federated media, as it applies to the entities where you put the media in question.
It can't really stop, and it, GDPR and EU, has never pretended it can stop storage of said media. But if you are an entity that is responsible for, and collect that data, then your are responsible for that data.
Federation breaks that model. GDPR works against centralized corporations retaining your data. It will be fun to see what happens the coming decade with these laws.
In regards to your "Deletion is not guaranteed on reddit, either" comment:
Went to delete my account last week. They put me in a password reset loop instead. That's gotta' be against GDPR.
Stuff you post in public could end up staying in public forever... It's like there are consequences for our actions...
Maybe i shouldn't use my real-life name anymore. Oh, wait. That's a nickname.
If your starting assumption on the internet is that each keystroke is ephemeral, Lemmy is not the problem.
If that is not your starting assumption, this is not news.
This has been discussed several times before and it's still as incorrect as it was originally. The author of that post has both a severe misunderstanding of how federation works, and a severe beef with the developers of Lemmy over their political differences.
This seems more like something to keep in mind when posting rather than a "DON'T USE LEMMY!!" kind of thing.
Everything I put on Lemmy stays on Lemmy? This article is eye-opening (not).
Wait, eyes can open?
And deletion on Usenet was effectively impossible. So? "Be conservative in what you send" (RFC 1855) remains good advice nearly thirty years later.
When did people forget basic internet safety? ANYTHING you put on the internet could stay there forever.
You'd be surprised by how many people don't consider this at all before they post stuff online.
Just look at the millions of muppets posting on Facebook.
You're right. I think a lot of people who didn't grow up right at the cusp of the internet weren't actually taught any internet safety.
Rule 1: never tell anyone your ASL, especially location.
Rule 2: No personally identifying details. If you could get doxxed using this information you shouldn't be putting it online.
Rule 3: Runescape will never ask you for your password
More people need to get slapped with a large trout I think.
OK, let's check the status of that today:
As an aside, the politics of the Lemmy creators are still mentioned a lot, but at this point the tankie population has been pretty much utterly outnumbered due to the Reddit migration, Lemmy has grown from a few hundred people to thousands and is STILL growing, hopefully it's no longer an issue.
Hey, you wanna give more context to point 3? I only found comments regarding that delete will spread but the servers can (though should not I guess) just replace the deleted object with a "Tombstone" object and thus not really delete.
I'm busy right now, will look for the exact code snippets later, but in summary from what i read earlier when i first came across these claims last month or so, any activity that happens with a comment is also federated: Creation, editing and deletion, so barring any cache that will eventually expire, or an instance going down, the lifetime of a message will be replicated across anything that federates with it.
And yes, a patched instance could just ignore deletion and save everything, but at that point you're fighting a rogue element and the rules change, we're discussing the normal, designed behavior of the software.
Yeah I understand that of course a random instance could just change the code so that nothing is deleted. However, what I meant is that in the documentation states that the instance can use this Tombstone instead of deleting and it seems like it is completely "fine" and within the rules to do so. I am referring to this:
... the server receiving the delete activity SHOULD remove its representation of the object with the same id, and MAY replace that representation with a Tombstone object.
From https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#delete-activity-inbox
So they should do it but it is also OK to use this different thing. Or am I misunderstanding this comment and it means that instances need to delete the object, and after the fact it is allowed for instances to furthermore make this Tombstone to somehow track that yes there was a deleted object here?
You might want to put a note about the sensationalist title, so that people don't just read the headline and come away with the wrong idea.
There's really no other way to implement this sort of a network. Once someone federates your messages, they can disconnect their server and keep your message forever. It doesn't matter what sort of protocol you put in to try to "securely redact" messages after the fact, there is still an edge case that the information that you make publicly available is available for eternity. If not by Lemmy itself, then by web scrapers, search engines, archives etc.
Cycle through generic accounts and don't put PII up. That's the best you can do with this sort of social media. If you want more privacy you need to take it to a non-public space, like chat rooms.
You don't really need to cycle. I've been using this handle across platforms since 1995, somewhat publicly for a few years, and I've never had a stalking problem, nor any other unwanted attention. If you just want to stir shit up, cycling is a good idea, but otherwise, most people just aren't important enough to stand out.
Holy fuck. I'm glad I never heard of or went to Raddle until now. The comments in that thread, including mod comments, are CANCER. There's one guy who repeatedly tries to correct their falsehoods, but he just gets belittled and called a liar. Fuck that shit.
I certainly don't like the Raddle community's reaction to this, however Beehaw's community has shown somewhat similar reactions to certain topics that have come up. Having some reactionary drama seems unavoidable in any social group. That said, the software that Raddle runs on is pretty sleek. Seems to rival Tildes in quality for a link aggregation and forum software. But it's inability to federate makes it fundamentally different from lemmy.
It's ironic that the anarchist devs created a centralized aggregator in Postmill, while the tankie devs who initially made Lemmy, made it a part of the fediverse. I'd honestly expect it to go the other way around.
It's not what I would have bet on, that's for sure.
Right? While I can understand trepidation, these guys seem to hate lemmy on a level that I don't understand.
It's more of the same tankies vs. anarchists fighting you see in a lot of leftist spaces, if I were to guess, and the Raddle set doesn't notice that not all Lemmy instances are tankie ones by a long shot.
I was scrolling public feed on mastodon and saw this. I was like what the helll
"Amazing how many 'leftists' are tripping over themselves to give untold power to a literal red fascist."
I just made the biggest facepalm ever after reading this and decided to close the page, lol.
So, obviously an anti Lemmy bias there, and not entirely true, but there are some aspects of federation it can be dangerous to ignore.
There is a different primary privacy focus here, and it provides an extreme level of privacy but places an extreme level of responsibility on the user for their own privacy, more than most places.
There is a distinction to a potential scrape and a system designed to duplicate, often irreversibly at submit.
There are also other things people are often not aware of and the community is not doing a great job communicating. Admins are not doing a great job of protecting themselves either.
For instance many, still don't know votes here are entirely public.
If you understand this all and are comfortable, great. Many do not prepare themselves and would engage differently if they had a better understanding.
For a take by someone who is pro-federation but not ignoring these concerns see: https://lemmy.ca/post/948217
Oh no the public forum where we post stuff keeps our data stored, instead of some third party scrapping it. The world will crumble now ...
Oh no, the email I sent to someone didn't get removed from their inbox after I deleted it from mine!
Oh jeez, the post I made on a public access fourm can be read by some dude!
I find raddle so god damn boring. No app, the website is almost too plain to use, no third party API to do anything, and it also doesn't remove EXIF data if you post something, on a site that "cares" about privacy.
Seeing as Ziq literally doesn't care if Raddle dies or not, it's not a loss on my end either. https://raddle.me/f/lobby/162409/if-raddle-goes-down-or-ziq-turns-tankie-for-whatever-reason
Presumably you can still edit your messages and replace the content via a script like people are doing on reddit?
Is it technically possible to ensure anything is deleted in a distributed system?
