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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Okay, since you clearly carefully read and completely agree and support eveything in the Lemmy TOS, please tell me where it says it will keep your comments forever.
You'll find that in the ActivityPub specifications, actually, where delete messages are optional to implement.
The choice of how it implements ActivityPub's optional components you'll find in the Lemmy (or other Fediverse) source code.
So do we expect every user to read, understand, accept and agree with the specifications and source code of lemmy before they make an account, and having done so, never make any complaints about it?
This isn't a difficult calculation - that person was effectively saying "yet you participate in lemmy" as a reason to dismiss any criticism. That should be on the face of it ridiculous. I don't understand why anyone is taking their side except as a knee-jerk defense of their favourite platform.
Lemmy isn't my favourite platform. Not even close. I'm not sure it's even in my top ten.
What I am attacking is the rampant ignorance over a fundamental aspect of technology. A distributed system by its very nature has copies. Sometimes the copies last for a few milliseconds (think your router) and sometimes the copies last effectively forever (think the Internet Archive). And there is nothing you as the user can do to change this. There is also nothing that prevents someone from making the delete side of things not delete things. (Yes, this includes your router. How do you think "wiretaps" of modern digital communications systems work?)
In the case of ActivityPub this is even more egregious a level of ignorance. The entire point of federated software is to copy and spread content, so if you have even half a brain cell you're going to have to know that there will be copies of everything you've ever posted on servers other than the one you posted it to. And yet we have stupid twats like the OP whining about the GDPR as if it is even slightly meaningful in a distributed system that crosses outside of EU's jurisdiction.
Yeah, okay, see that's a genuine, principled and material explanation with what's wrong with the OP's complaint, and I agree. The laws don't make a lot of sense.
What I don't agree with, and I think it should be at least as obvious as the point you just made, is that the response, "you can't make this complaint because you made an account here" is just thoroughly bankrupt. Of course people can make criticisms of the platform whilst having an account here.
Also though, your explanation that it's in the specs and source code seems like a tacit admission that it's not in the TOS, so appealing to some supposedly informed agreement to those TOS is doubly wrong.
I'm not saying that "you can't make this complaint because you made an account here". I'm saying "only an idiot can make this complaint because this is how all distributed systems work without exception". There isn't a single system out there that is connected to anything outside of itself that isn't susceptible at some level or another to exactly what the OP is complaining about.
This includes the router you have between you and the Internet at large.
EVERY distributed system retains copies somewhere for some duration. And ANY of them can be (pretty trivially) modified to just retain everything for as long as there is storage to hold it. If you want privacy you're going to need end-to-end cryptography, but that means no discussion sites like this.
So my objection to the OP's complaint is that it's just stupid. Because it applies to literally every piece of technology they likely use to post the complaint, but for some reason it's Lemmy that's being singled out.
I'm not saying that the terms can't be more transparent, because they absolutely can be.
But if you have become aware of this practice and you continue to participate, you have de facto agreed to it. You can of course agree to the terms and continue to criticize them, but you don't get to sign up for a soccer game and then claim that the rules against using your hands don't actually apply to you. If you don't want to face the consequences of how distributed services like this fundamentally work, don't use them.