Yeah but instances are supposed to e.g. delete posts when the user deletes them. A malicious instance might not do that. Even without malice, I know this doesn’t always work because some weeks ago, I deleted a comment almost immediately after saving it, then kept getting upvotes for it; I found out this was because (at least) one very popular instance hadn’t deleted that comment, its users were still seeing it and upvoting it.
Deletions have to propagate. Comments I deleted immediately after posting them still show up hours later for people on other instances. Archivers and crawlers have as many opportunities to record your deleted comment as there are lemmy instances federated to where you posted it.
An instance is not even required to access our posts and some user information. Most pages are just public.
Yeah but instances are supposed to e.g. delete posts when the user deletes them. A malicious instance might not do that. Even without malice, I know this doesn’t always work because some weeks ago, I deleted a comment almost immediately after saving it, then kept getting upvotes for it; I found out this was because (at least) one very popular instance hadn’t deleted that comment, its users were still seeing it and upvoting it.
The Internet Archive or archive.today might keep them as well.
Yes, but that is less likely if they have been deleted very soon after creation.
Deletions have to propagate. Comments I deleted immediately after posting them still show up hours later for people on other instances. Archivers and crawlers have as many opportunities to record your deleted comment as there are lemmy instances federated to where you posted it.