Right now, deleting a post on Lemmy only hides it locally, but doesn’t fully remove it across the fediverse. I understand the technical reasons behind this, but from a user perspective it feels incomplete.
Platforms should give users the ability to fully delete their own content, or at least send a federated deletion request to other instances. This is important for privacy, safety, and user control.
Is full deletion planned, or is there a technical limitation preventing it? I’d like to understand what’s possible and whether this feature is on the roadmap.
This quite literally already exists.
When you delete posts, comments or PMs, the ActivityPub message is a deletion. How other servers handle this depends on the software, some immediately delete the data, others will retain it for some time and trigger a delayed deletion. Others may not delete it at all. Likewise, if you delete your profile in Lemmy, you have the option to select whether your content should get deleted along with it.
With Lemmy, some of these actions are not always instantly deleting data from the database. For example, if you delete a post or comment, you still have the option to undelete it to restore the original content. From a moderation perspective, it is crucial to not purge everything from the DB without a trace immediately, as this would easily allow abuse by bad actors.