So say I make an account on lemmy.world and post a bunch of stupid comments around other instances then decide to delete my account because I’m ashamed of them. After I delete my account, a copy of all those comments I made on other instances remain on those instances as a “shadow copy.” There isn’t any way to actually delete them all. The copies of the comments/posts on your home instance will be deleted
tldr: Don’t say stupid shit on other instances you’ll regret later! They never leave that instance!
Why YSK: so you can think carefully about what to comment and post.
I migrated from beehaw. You can see my previous post history here: [email protected]
Updates and deletes should federate, but with defederation those actions may not spread to all servers.
Regardless, you should assume any message on Lemmy is stored on thousands of servers. Many of them will not even be part of a social media network, they could just as easily be gathering data to train machine learning models. Deleted messages also aren’t purged for a while (they weren’t purged at all a few versions back).
Once a message leaves your computer, you lose control over it. Once it gets replicated to other servers, it gets even worse. This can be a powerful anti-censorship measure, but it can also cause problems.
If you’re an EU citizen, you could try filing a GDPR deletion request. If they refuse, contact your local DPA for options. You still won’t be able to delete your information from servers that you can’t find, but it’ll get your messages removed from Google at least.
If you’re not an EU citizen, you can still ask the server admins nicely. That’s even less reliable, but I think most reasonable admins would agree to purging your stuff. Data replicated to some extremist instances may not get deleted this way, but it’s worth a shot.