If you’re talking to the public, nothing you say is private. That includes federated systems like Mastodon and Lemmy. If you want privacy and federation, using an encrypted Matrix chat. There’s still of course the caveat that the people you’re talking with can leak your chats, since they have a copy of them, so don’t talk to glowies.

All online systems suffer from this problem.

Bots are scraping websites daily, including places like archive.org, where they compile everything and save it for posterity. Half the time, your data is already saved by a third party, even if you delete it off a website.

Further, all databases have the option to flag something as “Deleted” and keep the original data while not showing the data on the main web page. Just because you “deleted” something online doesn’t fucking mean anything at all materially. It just means they are hiding it from end-users. The data is very likely still there. This is why people who are bulk-deleting their comments on Reddit are shocked to find those comments later restored… because they were never actually deleted to begin with. They were just flagged in the database as “deleted” and to not be shown to end-users.

Unless you are running your own server and your own service, you are at the mercy of strangers who are in full control over whatever data you share with them.

This has always been true, since the beginning of the internet.

This is why parents in the 90’s told kids to not post personal stuff online.

Because once it is sitting on a hard drive on a server owned by someone else, it is not legally any longer your data, it is now the data of the person who owns/operates that server and the hard drive.

Sorry for this message being kind of aggressive, I am very tired of everyone just figuring this out for the first time and thinking somehow it only applies to the Fediverse.

It applies to every single service you sign up for on the internet. You’re storing your data with someone else, and you don’t control the server software, database software, or hardware. That data is no longer yours. You are effectively hanging out on someone else’s property, and what you do on their property is being recorded.

This is not a Fediverse problem, this is an Internet problem.

EDIT: Forgot to add, it’s also the problem that the Fediverse is trying to help solve by allowing individuals to run their own instances and thus be in greater control of what happens to their own data.

You can’t truly delete anything period, anything posted publicly can be copied. What’s more important is if it’s verifiable. I can trivially edit your post locally and take a screenshot and pretend it’s you, but there’s nothing verifying you actually said it.

It’s possible through encryption to verify that something was actually said, but most of the time we verify things through trust, we trust centralized services to have an accurate record of what happened. We trust social networks to not alter the original content posted to it. We trust archive organizations to store an original copy securely as it was at the time.

But that trust can be broken. u/spez himself has admitted to altering comments (happen in 2016, huge red flag), and we can only trust that archivers did their job properly.

You can prove that a post was truly made and unedited via encryption, but even then you’re still trusting that all the clients you are using are not doing anything nefarious in between. Unless you read the source code and compile your own applications you can’t know for sure, so still, trust is a big part.

But if you can prove a post was made, how do you unprove it? I don’t really see how that’s mathematically possible. So when you “delete” something on the internet, you can’t really remove it completely.

So what does “deleting” something actually mean? What it really means is “please stop hosting this and monetizing it on your server”, and it’s not even possibly to be sure they deleted all of it internally, you can only really check that they are no longer showing it to the public. That’s easy enough to do when it’s a centralized service, but for anything decentralized it means going to every single server and getting them all to delete it. You can send out a signal asking them nicely to delete it, and I don’t know if Lemmy has this, but even if they did it’s unenforceable to get a server to fully delete something, but you could put some rules in place that it needs to be publicly inaccessible otherwise the instance gets defederated or something, but I don’t know how hard it would be to implement something like that. The resources required to verify that all instances have stopped serving it and don’t begin to serve it later may be far too high to be practical.

Posting something on a public forum will never be private, no matter where exactly. There’s so much ways for this content to get “saved” like web scrapers, web archive, screenshots etc.

I mean, everything you post is archived somewhere else in the same way. There’s multiple copies of everything on Reddit elsewhere, even if you delete your account and comments successfully without them restoring it.

In every other way than the one you mention, federation is more private. Especially since the data isn’t being collected to be sold.

Not just posts. Any message you are sending to anyone is unencrypted and can easily be looked at by instance owners.

Unextended ActivityPub makes it so that everything is shared without privacy, any operation is “best-effort” and also depends on the goodwill of the target (ie: a server could refuse all delete on purpose or refuse to deliver messages/posts without any hints)

Never rely on being able to delete anything that has been published/posted. If you want privacy, don’t post it. Yes, some systems make it easier to delete a post, but you can never rely on it being deleted everywhere (someone could have made a screenshot, etc.).

Public chats are, well public. If you are in a public chat then everyone can see what you say. Encryption or any other attempt to make it private are silly here. If you are in a private, encrypted group, then only those people can see what you say (unless someone leaks). If you are in a e2ee personal chat with one other person, then only the 2 of you know what is being said. If you send a regular email that is the same as a postcard and anyone can look at what it says. You choose where and how you want to speak and adjust accordingly.

I think you have a pretty weird understanding of “privacy” if you think that you have it when posting a comment in a publicly-accessible forum.

If you post it in a place I can find it, I can scrape it, store it, use it for my own putposes, in perpetuity. You might be able to convince a government to tell me to stop, but there is no guarantee I haven’t stored it somewhere you and they don’t know about.

That’s simply the nature of information. You don’t get to control my memory. Once you’ve put an idea in my head, you don’t get to take it back. That idea you put in my head is now my idea. It’s my thought.

You can’t unring the bell. You can keep a thought private, or you can post it. But once you’ve posted it, you can’t make it truly private again.

If it leaves your box it’s no longer yours. Even if it doesn’t leave on the wire and you delete it from disk there are readily found forensic tools that can recover lost data if you get an old drive in hand. It has been said the internet never forgets, and it keeps being proven true time and again whenever someone gets called out for something they said 10 years ago.

Expect the future, own your past, make your marks and grow as you go.

The idea that things could be deleted by you at any time was always delusional, fediverse or otherwise. There are more meaningful privacy battles to fight anyways.