Federated services have always had privacy issues but I expected Lemmy would have the fewest, but it’s visibly worse for privacy than even Reddit.
- Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible
- Deleted account usernames remain visible too
- Anything remains visible on federated servers!
- When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server
deleted by creator
Surely this and “a federated system of deletion” is something that can be fixed by the open source devs after there done with the ungodly amount of work the influx of users creates?
There is a federated system of deletion, it just doesn’t have guarantees to work. The problem is that it’s a distributed system among untrusted actors. Usually the only way to have a distributed, secure, untrusted system is to use a blockchain. In the absence of a blockchain or equivalent, we keep the “distributed” and “untrusted” but concede the “secure”.
This doesn’t just go for deletions. It also means submissions or edits might not affect other servers. Malicious servers could also change all your posts to say “I’m an ugly moron” and those could get propagated to other servers.
Damn, ive actually always been in favor of integrating blockchain into the web. My best idea was that if we used blockchain to track orginal sources of verified images/footage to combat misrepresentation/fake news. Then nft happend and that mess understandably ruined any appetite for blockchain progress.