I like sharing my thoughts and struggles here, but I don’t want it to be a permanent digital footprint and wish to delete all the posts and comments one day.
No.
If you post it on the internet, it’s there forever.
If this were really true, why is there the existence of link rot and a large volume of online lost media?
I think the proper way to say this is that “if you post it on the internet, you should consider it being there forever”.
For example - a personal one. I did a short ambient music podcast series highlighting artists who release music via Creative Commons (a new thing at the time). It was only 5 episodes, and I have the first one archived. The other four are now completely lost to time, despite being put out on the internet back then. It’s not there forever.
In terms of social media, it’s harder to not be forever, but even that’s down to the same issues - has someone else archived it, screenshotted, especially in the case of a site ceasing to function? Internet Archive doesn’t preserve everything either. Plenty of archived pages missing images or files that enable true functionality to view everything as it was.
I’m gonna archive this post and back it up twice so future generations can witness your immense pedantry.
Fucking Diabolical.
I’ll bet someone has copies of those 4 episodes. I know I have random things downloaded and stored (mostly music and Git repos) that are no longer discoverable on the internet. You just need to find the right data hoarder.
And I guess that’s part of what is meant by if you post it on the internet it’s there forever all it means is you never know who has a backup
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That maxim is no longer true, especially in the medium-to-long term. Reddit posts older than 8 or so years old aren’t accessible (even to their creators), same with the original Digg posts. If you go back to the Usenet days, most posts haven’t been archived and are lost, especially those from the smaller newsgroups. I expect over the coming decades, we’ll see data loss as a growing issue.
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I can see my first reddit posts from 2009 on wayback machine.
It’s interesting that this is kicking up some controversy. Personally I’ve held similar thoughts since the time of AOL, that once it leaves your system it’s no longer in your control. You can ask people to delete it, and maybe they did, or maybe they deleted the one copy but not the cache version, or maybe just didn’t and lied about it. I’ve actually accidentally found stuff I thought was long lost when I decided to just mess around with some data recovery tools and pulled a bunch of pictures back from a drive I didn’t remember them ever being on.
One of my kids I saw take a picture of a snapchat with another phone. Asked what they where doing and it was explained that if you do a regular screenshot it notified the other person, so this was how they kept a copy secretly. So with that in mind, you never know who has copies of what that was posted.
It’s interesting that this is kicking up some controversy.
Yeah. You’d think that people on the fediverse, protocols that lend themselves to mass-scraping, would understand that it’s out of their hands once they post it.
Harder here than on centralized platforms because everything you posted here has been copied to other servers which might ignore your requests to delete things.
Is there any such lemmy alternative with similar crowd?
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No.
As redwizard said, you can edit all your posts and request a purge, but that doesn’t mean that the administrators of instances federated with yours will actually do so.
It’s also trivial to have a private fork whose purge process is “log that a purge was requested for the following db items”.
Federation means you can never vanish. Even if it did, people screenshot stuff now more than ever.
Edit all your posts then request a purge.
Even if you managed to delete the posts from all federated servers, they will still be archived in various places like the wayback machine and similar.
Better to only post what you’re comfortable sharing forever.
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You should be able to contact your admins so they purge your account. Purged accounts have all the content they ever published scrubbed from all databases on Lemmy. I’m not entirely sure how it works if there’s an instance that is defederated from your home instance after you post something and it gets federated to them, I assume it wouldn’t be deleted in that case so it would still be available online there, but certainly a lot harder to track down.
