How is this possible?
Some apps, especially Sync, will download one or more pages of content for quick interaction to local storage. If you download that stuff before they get deleted, they’re on your phone.
Some foreign servers either don’t receive deletes, bug out when dealing with deletes, or refuse to do the delete. It’s kind of a dice roll whether or not actually get removed from other servers after deletion. If your home server didn’t delete the comment that another home server asked to delete, and your app connects to your home server, the comment will stick around of course.
If you want to delete stuff from Lemmy, a) assume it doesn’t work (because malicious servers can just ignore deletion requests) and b) edit your comment to be near-empty before hitting the delete button, as edits seem to propagate the fediverse much better. This still won’t purge your comment from any malicious server, of course, as all ActivityPub messages between servers are normally requests, not commands.
Also, be aware that server administrators (of any server connected to the server you posted on) can see deleted comments, and even restore them locally.
Can you link to an example?
As far as I know, Lemmy doesn’t allow the deletion of content. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1b6g219/psa_you_cant_delete_photos_uploaded_to_lemmy_so/
You should however be able to overwrite your posts. So when you delete them, change every field to random nonsense.
Lemmy does support deleting comments. Federation of deletes seems rather unstable, but it should work.
Images are still visible, of course, at least until the pull request fixing this gets deployed to servers people are on.
That has nothing to do with federation - I can still read deleted comments that other users of my instance posted in local communities
In that case, the deleted comments were cached locally before. They should disappear if you clear your app cache/data and log in again.
Just like on Facebook, when you delete a comment on Lemmy it gets stuck with a “deleted” flag that’s possible to undo on some clients, including the official one last time I did it.
To be fair, your incredulity is totally understandable. I think we should fix Lemmy too.
I think part of the issue is that you can undo the deletion of your own posts, which is a nice feature to have.
I think what we need is
- hide: does what “delete” does now
- delete: with a permanent warning that the action is irreversible
Add in a warning when posting or commenting that hiding/deleting may not federate
