I found a way to retrieve the text of comments deleted by user or mod. I don't think it is an issue of federated instances not respecting the deletion.
Is it a bug?
Or is "deleting" always really just "hiding"?
I found a way to retrieve the text of comments deleted by user or mod. I don't think it is an issue of federated instances not respecting the deletion.
Is it a bug?
Or is "deleting" always really just "hiding"?
Because of how easy it is to delete things on lemmy, deletion is basically just a temporary override of content. The way to perma-delete, or ‘purge’ i.e. how it’s listed in the mod tools is editing a comment to overwrite it preceding a deletion. If you need to remove something for opsec reasons, this is the way to go. If I were more involved in dev and had the capacity to make that decision, I wouldn’t be opposed to hiding an option to purge one of your own comments in a streamlined manner behind the dropdown and an explicit confirm dialogue.
A long time ago I heard that the most effective way to delete reddit comments was to edit the comment to have no real content, then wait a while (days/weeks/months) so that any reddit mirroring/scraping service would have time to pick it up. Then delete it.
The premise being that such services would only retain the most up to date version of the comment.
With federation in the mix I don't know what would be expected.
Reddit itself used to not archive previous edits of comments, which is why this was recommended. Whether scraping or mirroring services don't depends on the service I would assume.
That probably worked for some, I pushshift's API returned just the latest revision and a timestamp it was edited at. For forums I archive, I store every event. If it's a small enough edit (using difflib I think) then I store the deltas. If it overwrote most of the comment I store the latest non-overwritten one and mark it as having been overwritten with the last event time on the comment.
Text is tiny, and with federation it's trivial to scrape but even centralized forums barely impede data archival.
Ya but it's unusual to be doing that.
In tests I was able to retrieve the text of comments deleted a year ago, when I had never even participated in lemmy. Certainly I have no archive of anything and if I did it wouldn't extend so far back.
I think it's fair to allow people to get rid of the low-hanging fruit if they want. Even though the internet is forever. Depending on the threat model, it might be good enough.