Thing is, Lemmy is easily compliant with the EU's laws on this, because the laws state that the EU citizen merely needs to request the data be deleted. It says nothing about them having direct access to the lever to do it.

A basic Python script can be used purge the database after a written request and everything's kosher.

I don't understand why posts are held in reserve, rather than outright deleted. That's a design decision that doesn't totally make sense to me. I can see holding on to it for a period of time - 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, what have you - so that users can undelete things, but just hiding it from end users and calling it deleted seems pointless to me.

It's not like anyone is trying to sell it to 3rd parties for model training. And while I could see a use case in academic research, the delete button seems like an implied revocation of a license to show or distribute the content, at least in the absence of a proper ToS.

And it just makes more noise for admins and mods.