If at some point you want to delete your account and have your posts and comments be gone, you better delete it all manually before you actually delete the account, because that deletion process does not really work as advertised.

For my main account on world (which runs an outdated lemmy version), it seemed like at least the account deletion was federated so that my user page was no longer browsable from other instances, but none of my posts, comments or images had been deleted, not even on the home instance.

The homie @MrKaplan@lemmy.world helped me by manually deleting my stuff, but it seems like that has only worked for the home instance, posts and comments seem to still be readable from other instances (except for some of the images that MrKaplan manually deleted too, but that was only possible up to a date not too far in the past because lemmy used to not associate user uploads with the accounts). So my old posts from the world account can be viewed just fine from other instances:

https://lemm.ee/post/1379925

For other instances that are more up to date the process is even worse imo, while locally things seem to get deleted, federation does not seem to happen at all. For example you can still browse my deleted slrpnk or lemmee accounts from other instances just fine:

https://slrpnk.net/u/achtungdrempels@lemm.ee

https://lemm.ee/u/AchtungDrempels@slrpnk.net

Account deletion in piefed works kinda like the old lemmy system (as on lemmy.world), and nothing gets deleted except the user page (which also seems to get federated), the posts and comments stay up.

Thought this would be interesting to some, if i had known what a mess this would be (obviously expected some federation issues, just not like that), i would have manually deleted everything. I deleted all these accounts in December, maybe this has been addressed somehow in the meantime, personally i’d have trust issues in this process.

  • deegeese@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    506·
    6 months ago

    Nothing is ever really deleted on the internet, especially if it was automatically replicated to dozens of other servers.

  • Nooodel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    6 months ago

    I don’t see why people get so riled up in the comment section of this post.

    Is the original post a legit psa? Definitely. Will this become problematic with European law at some point? Well at least it’s going to be interesting. Should we care? Seeing as lemmy development is partially funded by the European Commission, definitely! Should we care for altruistic reasons? Also definitely. This place is supposed to be better than the centralized corporate social media to its users, especially also regarding privacy. It’s good practice to set up new accounts every once in a while against doxing and seeing how much of the community on lemmy is built by people who are sensitive to their privacy this is sth we should respect.

    Should we break down in squabbles here of one instance against another? Please, if I want to hear “all people from place x are bad” I’d just switch on an election debate. Show that your adults. Take your peers and their concerns here seriously. Make something out of it when people raise legit concerns. Thank you bonjour for bringing up this topic.

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    132·
    6 months ago

    The fediverse is inherently a place where it’s a lot harder to delete anything than on non-federated platforms. It always will be because everything you post here is instantly copied to hundreds (if not thousands) of other servers. Some of them may be actively hostile and intentionally not respect deletions. Some of them may just be misconfigured or for another non-malicious reason fail to delete things.

    So don’t post things on the fediverse that you think you might one day regret.

      • kamenLady.@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        6 months ago

        So don’t post things on the fediverse that you think you might one day regret.

        I think they meant this as general advice for all lemmings and not your particular post, which btw is very much appreciated.

  • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    93·
    6 months ago

    Another reason why I suggest another instance than LW

    Lemmy from 0.19.4 allows users to at least delete their uploaded images

    • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      Yeah, that’s what I also wonder. Lemmy is still too small to attract any attention from regulators, but I wonder how the GDPR would work with federation.

      There are some differences with normal social media though: every instance is managed by different people, so in theory you would have to ask every federated instance for your data to be deleted.

      Or, maybe, posting on the fediverse may be compared to spreading pamphlets with your messages to many different people; you can’t expect a reasonable way to “recall” everything you shared with the public.

      I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer. But it’s going to be interesting. Meta, in the meantime, decided not to risk it at all and their fediverse integration just doesn’t work in the EU.

  • L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    Your account is not your posts. Why would one assume that deleting the account would remove the posts? When a person stops speaking the things they said do not become unsaid. When they die their actions don’t retroactively undo themselves.

  • Nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    When deleting the account did you mark the checkbox “Delete all posts, comments and uploaded images”? Lemmy.world is running an old version so its possible that this is missing. Without that it is expected that only the profile gets deleted, while content is still available.

    As for federated account deletion this is implemented and covered by test cases and should work in theory. However it is always possible that there is a bug. It would be helpful if you could open an issue with exact steps to reproduce. Use enterprise.lemmy.ml and ds9.lemmy.ml to test the latest version.

      • Nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        Originally account deletion would always delete your posts, comments and everything. This was changed in 0.19 to make the content deletion optional (otherwise a lot of posts and comments would disappear unnecessarily). Unfortunately we forgot to add the new option to the user interface for 0.19, but it was added probably around 0.19.4.

        Its hard to say why the federation didnt work properly, maybe there was a network error, or a bug in older Lemmy versions that got fixed in the meantime. Or there is still a bug which only happens in some cases.