Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
Is it just user activity that’s public? Curious to know about what is preserved on the backend, like if user removed posts/etc get stored somewhere accessible like this too.
Deleted items just get marked as ‘removed’, the content remains in the database. I can see the comment you deleted on https://lemmy.world/post/955546.
Overwrites appear to replace the original content. I can see when you edited this comment but can’t see what the edit was.
What happens if someone posts something illegal? Does the instance owner have to know enough SQL to remove the row and the image connected to it or is there a friendly way to do it in an admin interface?
There’s purge post/comment. I don’t know if there’s an easy way to go backwards and find what post a picture is associated with when that’s the only information you have.
Self removals are hard to sync between instances, so a message you posted and deleted can linger forever.
For example, a message I posted from sopuli.xyz to a pawb.social post and then deleted shows as being deleted on sopuli, but is still visible on pawb.
Mod removals are all publicly listed neatly right here on the mod-log: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemoveComment
