Hi all!
So, with the whole lemm.ee saga, I would like to be able to delete my whole comment history. I know they should get deleted from lemm.ee the moment I delete my account, but I think these don’t get federated, and all the comments I made back in the day under this account will remain forever in the federated instances. Moreover, once the account is deleted there won’t be a way to remove them. So I wanted to try and delete them first. Is this possible, is there a tool that could do this for me like the old reddit nuking tool?
You cannot meaningfully delete your posts or comments. That’s not because of any issue with lemmy, but because you posted them publicly. They will be archived and indexed in other services.It is always best to remember that all your activity here is public, and will be linked to your username. Given that, you may wish to minimise any personally identifying information you post, and use several accounts to split up your activities by topic.
I don’t believe other instances will receive any sort of deletion request from lemm.ee, it’ll just go away. Any instances that have a copy of your posts or comments will keep them for as long as they wish. Even if you manually delete the comments and lemm.ee federates that action out, there is no guarantee that any other server will actually act on it, and you can be certain that archiving services will not.
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that you posted, commented or voted in public, and that will remain public indefinitely. That’s as much down to howpublic data is captured by other entities as it is to the concept of federation.
You don’t have much choice in this case. Some instances will either not receive your account deletion request or just ignore it. Some instances might not even understand the deletion request. You can try contacting the admin of each instance, but I’m not sure whether you’d like to spend weeks contacting the admins of thousands of instances.
This is what I was telling people when they were saying “well it’s against the GPDR!” and I was responding that functionally they’d have to go after every single federated instance, including those outside of the jurisdiction and deal with hundreds of other countries. And I got downvoted for it
If Barbra Streisand cannot delete her name from her house on the Internet, you cannot delete your comments. The Internet only forgets when you don’t want it to. If you want it to forget, it never will.
Posting a comment on the Internet is something that can never be undone. Once it’s out there, it’s out there forever. You can try and delete it, and you might make some progress, you might even be successful, but there are no guarantees, and the more you want it to be deleted the less likely you’ll be able to pull it off.
In a practical sense, just use to built-in features to delete your account and posts. It’s not perfect or guaranteed, but it’s the best you’re going to get.
Go to settings, scroll down to delete. Make sure you check “Delete Posts and Comments”
Comments should get auto-overwritten with “deleted by creator” (you can actually see the edit logo whete you wouldn’t otherwise see with a normal delete) then it gets deleted which would also show the same “deleted by creator” text, but I don’t think posts also get overwritten, they just get deleted. Images are locally stored on the instance so they should all be gone when it deletes.
You could also try a script, I never tested any.
There is probably a high likelihood of there being at least one instance that will refuse the deletion federation.
For the future, assume all Posts/Comments are public forever and just use Tor. Privacy doesn’t exist on a public forum, you goal should instead be anonymity, not privacy.
Assuming the lemm.ee admins delete the entire servers when it shuts down, any IP logs should be gone unless someone (admins or hosting servers) kept a copy of the logs.
In principle account deletions, post/comment deletions and edits to posts/comments should all get federated… but ultimately the federated model means that there’s no guarantee all instances that have copies will receive that or act on it. The fediverse doesn’t forget as easily as centralized platforms do.
Admins can clear all of account content when banning it, and that should federate, but thats on the original instance. Otherwise I dont think theres a way to do that at this point. Sounds like a possible, although tricky, feature to be requested/proposed to devs.
I found this repo with a Rust tool to auto remove comments. I have not tested it though: https://github.com/skullgiver/lemmy-comment-auto-delete
