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PSA: You can't delete photos uploaded to Lemmy. So don't (accidentally) upload a nude
(tech.michaelaltfield.net)
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this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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You can't delete any text in comments or posts either - or at least not reliably, as any federated instance could choose to ignore deletions.
You should basically consider what you write or post here public, and probably public for good. But here's the thing - same goes for the entire rest of the Internet as well, basically.
You should generally think similarly about anything you post anywhere on the internet that has open access. If it's viewable anonymously, anyone could save and mirror it.
The only difference is it's almost guaranteed on a federated platform.
I feel like, after over a decade of smartphones and snapchat and such, a younger generation needs to be thought better what putting content on the Internet means on a fundamental level, and those of us old enough to remember the more open web need to be reminded.
If you don't want everyone to see it, and I mean everyone, then you shouldn't put it online. For all intents and purposes, once you hit send, it's now a part of the internet. You might get lucky and be able to remove it, but that's the exception, not the rule.
Sometimes views on things change and maybe some picture or other content you posted now makes you a target in some way that it didn't before. You don't always know how things will change in the future and adding such a highly expected piece of functionality like deleting something you uploaded should probably be more highly prioritized.
Let's be clear that this problem has nothing to do with Lemmy or the Lemmy devs. This is not a problem of prioritisation and it is not something that can just be fixed.
This is a problem of ActivityPub and the nature of federated services. There is just no way you force a federated server to delete something. So while most servers are well behaved, others might not be. Such servers could be defederated but you need to detect such bad behaviour first.
The problem is not with Lemmy, it's the whole Fediverse and ultimately also the Internet that works like this.
(the problem of a user uploading a photo and never posting it anywhere and wanting that to be deleted should be fixable though)
Yeah, that makes sense. I didn't really have the full scope of the issue in my mind when I wrote my comment. Thanks for giving some extra perspective.