You can’t delete any text in comments or posts either - or at least not reliably, as any federated instance could choose to ignore deletions.
You should basically consider what you write or post here public, and probably public for good. But here’s the thing - same goes for the entire rest of the Internet as well, basically.
You should generally think similarly about anything you post anywhere on the internet that has open access. If it’s viewable anonymously, anyone could save and mirror it.
The only difference is it’s almost guaranteed on a federated platform.
I feel like, after over a decade of smartphones and snapchat and such, a younger generation needs to be thought better what putting content on the Internet means on a fundamental level, and those of us old enough to remember the more open web need to be reminded.
If you don’t want everyone to see it, and I mean everyone, then you shouldn’t put it online. For all intents and purposes, once you hit send, it’s now a part of the internet. You might get lucky and be able to remove it, but that’s the exception, not the rule.
Sometimes views on things change and maybe some picture or other content you posted now makes you a target in some way that it didn’t before. You don’t always know how things will change in the future and adding such a highly expected piece of functionality like deleting something you uploaded should probably be more highly prioritized.
I agree with your core concept.
But this is a pretty wild flaw. The fact that even an admin can’t reliably delete photos from their own instance? That’s begging to be exploited by bad actors. What happens when it’s porn (whether kids or unconsenting adults)? It’s core functionality that you have to have.
I didnt know about that. This is a bit scary to be honest, and the first time I feel a bit taken aback with lemmy
You also know that all votes are technically public and can be viewed by any instance admin that’s federated with the server a community is on, right? There’s no way to see that in the Lemmy UI at the moment but the data is there on the server.
There’s no way to see that in the Lemmy UI at the moment but the data is there on the server.
Actually, they’re adding it into the UI for admins. And they’re letting mods see to.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2320
Rather than do anything to try and protect this data or obfuscate it in any way, they just decided “fuck it”.
And that’s frankly worrying. I truly don’t think people understand why Reddit didn’t let mods see that information. The avenues for abuse here are innumerable.
I mean you could say the same thing about reddit - anyone could scrape reddit and save comments and stuff, even if you later delete them.
If someone can see something on their computer, they can save it and you won’t be able to take it away. I mean… it’s just how the internet works.
The difference is that things on Reddit were public because Reddit chose to make them available, while things on Lemmy are public because they have to be in order for the federated protocol to work.
Lemmy and other services built on ActivityPub work by sending content to every server that hosts a user who has subscribed to a community or another user. Those servers could be anything from vanilla Lemmy hosted in a datacenter to an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of ActivityPub running on a jailbroken smart light bulb. Most of them will be online to receive a delete request and will handle it correctly most of the time, but that cannot be guaranteed.
Anything you share to the world that way is out in the world and cannot be reliably rescinded. Discussion groups implemented as email lists used to be popular, and the same was true there, but more so since there isn’t a mechanism intended to edit or delete an email message after it is sent. Something similar is true of anything that functions as a public website; a great many things published to the web are available from sites like archive.org, like old forum posts.
I don’t know if this works on Lemmy, but Reddit used to be like this and a solution was to edit your comment to different text first (something like ‘I like turtles’), wait about a week to allow the new text to be archived, and then delete it.
‘I like turtles’ wasn’t special, but makes it easy to scroll through your comments later when deleting things.
In Lemmy, your username will still show up with deleted comments, but in theory the edited text will replace the original comment you want to delete in archived views. This method doesn’t work with post images, though.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, please.
e: I’ve edited this comment thrice in 2 hours. Can anyone tell, and can you differentiate my 3 edits?
On the front end this still theoretically works, but it’s unclear when (if ever) reddit respected it on the back end. They might have an archive of all the text ever put on the site.
And seemingly nothing is actually deleted, just hidden. Boost for Lemmy currently has an interesting bug where any comment, deleted or removed, can still be seen by simply selecting “copy post text” from the menu, as the API will return what was previously there.
PSA, if you want to delete a comment or post, be absolutely sure you first edit it to be blank.
It’s a different level of can’t delete though, because if you upload a photo but never even post it, it will still be up forever. And at least a working delete protocol exists for text
Lemmy in general is filled with potential security and privacy holes. The threat surface is just too massive.
Not to mention it has a bunch of vulnerabilities in terms of just basic forum functionality. A rogue instance can very easily just hijack all sorts of federated content and force it into a certain state as desired. Especially if that content is old. There is not really any mechanism for tracking source authority for federated updates, and there are definitely already signs that this is getting exploited to promote certain content and fuck with vote totals IMO.
None of this really matters at this point because Lemmy is insignificant, but it kind of places a limit on how much Lemmy can be scaled before it just becomes even more of a cringe propaganda wasteland than it already is.
A rogue instance can very easily just hijack all sorts of federated content and force it into a certain state as desired.
I’m really not sure what you mean by this, can you elaborate?
There is not really any mechanism for tracking source authority for federated updates, and there are definitely already signs that this is getting exploited to promote certain content and fuck with vote totals IMO.
I’m not sure what you mean by “not any mechanism for tracking source authority”. Admins on their own instance are in control of what happens to the content and they’ll know if another site edits content or whatever as that is sent as requests in ActivityPub.
What are the signs you’re referring to?
Are updates authenticated? Or can I send an update to lemmy.world from 123.123.123.123 (which is not the IP address of feddit.de) that you have edited your comment to say “I don’t like pizza”?
If updates are not authenticated this really could be a big problem.
Is this not illegal under GDPR? The right to retrieve and delete all data is a fundamental part of that legislation. Maybe only European hosted instances are in jurisdiction?
