I was thinking about this recently… By going to a federated system, one that essentially copies all of your content from one instance to another, when you delete a comment, does that comment get deleted on every instance? Is that even possible?
I was thinking about this recently… By going to a federated system, one that essentially copies all of your content from one instance to another, when you delete a comment, does that comment get deleted on every instance? Is that even possible?
I agree with everyone that this is an issue that affects all data on the Internet and everyone should treat what they publish with this in mind.
However, it may be worth requesting a feature for broadcasting delete requests to federated instances, though it’s not going to be a high priority as the devs prioritize scaling, bug fixes, and mobile app development.
Also, one would hope you could trust your admins to defederate from instances who aren’t respecting delete requests.
AFAIK deletes do get federated. Also, it would be trivial to implement soft delete where the data is retained but bot shown.
In some cases soft deletes are good and useful because it allows things “deleted” for spam and rule breaking to be retained and used to build a case against a bad user/bot or train spam filters, etc.