Fediverse @lemmy.world adrianhooves @lemmy.today 7d ago

i have a question about fediverse of lemmy lemmy posts

hi i just wanted to ask a question which is the following umm why, why does when you do delete a post in profile your main profile does it not get deleted?? like it gets deleted but in the main profile it gets a little trash can symbol red symbol, red symbol on the right!! which means that it's been deleted but it still shows up in my profile history how can i delete it forever please?? thanks you so much!!!

19 comments

It means it's deleted by you but it isn't permanently deleted, you can restore it anytime you want. When it is deleted only you and admins can see it, until it is dumped from the database, then it will only show as Permanently Deleted
As another commenter has said, this is likely just a feature of the interface and not a reflection of what other users see.

But you should keep in mind that, due to the nature of federation, your posts are copied to all other instances that are federated with yours—which in theory includes not just lemmy instances but any software implementing the ActivityPub protocol. Whether those instances actually remove posts you’ve marked as deleted is up to their discretion.
- you're right, so that means that the admins of the servers that each lemmy instance uses are responsible for deleting or purging deleted content that can be undeleted? thanks
  
  I believe that an out-of-the-box lemmy instance will remove deleted content from federated instances automatically.
  
  My point is just that site maintainers can modify the software to do whatever they want, or run software that implements ActivityPub but whose functionality is completely different from that of lemmy.
If I get it correctly then that deleted post is only visible to you in case you want to undelete it.
- ok thank you!!
- Why is it designed this way? Someone could upload illegal materials for example and that content still remains on the server. Wouldn't that be a huge liability for instance hosters?
  
  Admins can purge users/posts/comments, which actually deletes it from the server
Because it takes a bit for the request to delete to get sent to every single instance that might have duplicated the post. It then takes time for the post to be deleted, assuming the instances that receive the request to delete follow the request. Also YOU yourself will still see the content because you will have the option to restore it if you didn't intend to delete it.

Same for when you post. I've noticed about an average of about 20 minutes before my posts are visible on other instances.

In the future, I would recommend assuming that anything you post to Lemmy or any other website/social media will be up there forever because once it's out in the open, it may be entirely impossible to remove every single instance of that post from every single thing that copied it. The server may be malicious itself and not honor any deletion requests, as well as users who may have seen the post archived it themselves.

19 comments