Before I left Reddit, I used a plugin through the api to replace all of my comments with random gibberish and then delete them. Part of this was because (mandatory) fuck spez. But more importantly, it was to protect the anonymity of my account. After years of posting, there is likely enough personal information shared to potentially connect my Reddit habits to my online identity. I wasn’t planning on using Reddit again in the future on that account, but I left it open in order to maintain some security control over the account. I’m not really sure what to do at this point because I still consider it a security vector that’s a bit concerning. There’s no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail’s-pace reddit UI, and I have no ability to assure that my content will remain unavailable or at least not publicly displayed.
Just wait till you hear how Lemmy “deletes” things. Illegal revenge and child porn, genocidal hate speech, everything is stored forever and in some apps, not even obscured.
Yeah, I’ve mentioned elsewhere that the fediverse is far worse. Lemmy is among the worst activity pub implementations in this regard, and they are all pretty fundamentally flawed.
Federated platforms are by nature trickier in this regard. Even email is difficult to truly delete.
We as admin can very much delete your existence upon request or if we wish. I think they also make purging photo easier too. Federated content though, that’s a different thing.
If you see that shit then report it.
To be far, anything posted to the internet is there forever.
Then again, that doesn’t mean Lemmy can’t improve