Federated services have always had privacy issues but I expected Lemmy would have the fewest, but it’s visibly worse for privacy than even Reddit.
- Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible
- Deleted account usernames remain visible too
- Anything remains visible on federated servers!
- When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server
This is a negative behavior by Lemmy, in my opinion. Deleted comments should be purged after some time. Tildes does the same thing - I think with 30 days?
These should be replaced with some random string of characters or something like DeleteUser<numberhere> or something.
This is just a concession of federation.
This is an issue, too, in my opinion.
Honestly, this is definitely something that can be added - and in fact it might even be beneficial to server costs. Alongside optional deletion of cached data from other instances maybe a year or two after the data arrived.
People need to remember that Lemmy is an alpha software - we haven’t even reached the big 1.0 release
can’t anyone who runs a lemmy instance script all that in the db? alternately, can’t anyone who claims to do so just not do it in the db? it’s not like you would ever know.
A sketchy instance operator isn’t really a solid defense against implementation of better privacy features in the source code.