Federated services have always had privacy issues but I expected Lemmy would have the fewest, but it’s visibly worse for privacy than even Reddit.

  • Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible
  • Deleted account usernames remain visible too
  • Anything remains visible on federated servers!
  • When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server
    • It could, but actually policing it would be difficult. I don’t think there is any “yeah I’ll do that” response and even if there is an instance could say it will delete it and still do nothing.

        •  t3rmit3   ( @t3rmit3@beehaw.org ) 
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          1 year ago

          while this is certainly feasible, it is just a compliance checkmark of “doing your best”. It wouldn’t actually prevent someone attempting to persist that data. For example, I just need to maintain an insert-only copy of my deletion-compliant lemmy instance DB, and none of the deletions would be reflected on that.

          I could then host that copy publicly on some unrelated lemmy instance, and without systematically de-federating from all other instances, you wouldn’t know which one was retaining the data.