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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s a vast difference between someone archiving your comments and not being able to remove content from a public facing position on the site where you originally posted it. I don’t find the “…but anyone can archive it” argument very compelling. For example, on reddit it was quite easy for me to delete a comment, and from the point of view of most users, that comment was gone. Same with Twitter, or Facebook, or Tumblr, or the vast majority of forums. This has been normalized since the earliest days of the internet, and archiving/screenshotting/downloading content aside, most of us have come to act accordingly. Not that we don’t take proper precautions, not that we don’t treat content as if someone could grab it, but again this is quite a different scenario.
I think we need to be realistic about the fact that this forum (Lemmy in general, not this instance specifically) has some uniquely troubling privacy concerns, even by fediverse standards. I wish the devs would address this, but they don’t seem willing.
I do agree with you that people need to be extra careful about what we write or share on this forum, even moreso than in other forums we may have used in the past.
I would be curious to know more. As far as I am aware, what lemmy does differently is that it still shows username when you delete a comment, and lets you restore your comments until you delete your account. If you delete your account everything is deleted. That isn’t the normal policy but it’s better than reddit’s where the site owners can unilaterally decide to restore content users deleted.
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.
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.
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.
Good link
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.
There’s a vast difference between someone archiving your comments and not being able to remove content from a public facing position on the site where you originally posted it. I don’t find the “…but anyone can archive it” argument very compelling. For example, on reddit it was quite easy for me to delete a comment, and from the point of view of most users, that comment was gone. Same with Twitter, or Facebook, or Tumblr, or the vast majority of forums. This has been normalized since the earliest days of the internet, and archiving/screenshotting/downloading content aside, most of us have come to act accordingly. Not that we don’t take proper precautions, not that we don’t treat content as if someone could grab it, but again this is quite a different scenario.
I think we need to be realistic about the fact that this forum (Lemmy in general, not this instance specifically) has some uniquely troubling privacy concerns, even by fediverse standards. I wish the devs would address this, but they don’t seem willing.
I do agree with you that people need to be extra careful about what we write or share on this forum, even moreso than in other forums we may have used in the past.
I would be curious to know more. As far as I am aware, what lemmy does differently is that it still shows username when you delete a comment, and lets you restore your comments until you delete your account. If you delete your account everything is deleted. That isn’t the normal policy but it’s better than reddit’s where the site owners can unilaterally decide to restore content users deleted.