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Yes, but other instances or applications don't have to honour your deletion requests. And internet archives exist to record every change to every website in the universe.
So you should always live under the assumption that everything you publicly say will be available for all eternity.
Nutomic, one of the original developers of Lemmy explains here that overwriting your post and deleting your account will remove the content permanently. Deleting a post individually will however leave its content in the database of the instance, for recovery purpose:
However, If I recall correctly, I think that when creating a post if you upload an image then it is immediately put into the database whether or not the post is actually made. As a result I don't think there is a way to overwrite these, so some trace would still remain in such an instance if I am not mistaken.
Furthermore none of this prevents or rectifies snapshots or backups of data being created by pretty much any entity - I know that's probably not in the scope of the question, but just something tangentially related to keep in mind.
You can delete uploaded media since v.19 iirc.
There's a media tab in your profile on supported clients where you can see and remove uploaded media files.
Missed that update, that's great to know. Thanks!
The best advice I got was to periodically delete your current account and create a new one. Then remove any association you have with the old account: history, password managers, etc. Yes, that accounts comments may live on for ever in some archive, but removing your association with it goes a long way towards plausible deniability. If your super paranoid only access Lemmy through tor going forward.
This is my approach. A new account once a year.
I used to do the same every year or two on Reddit, for similar reasons. Mostly to prevent the accidental accumulation of PII that could be compiled to dox me. Just nuke the old account, start fresh with a brand new account, and import subscriptions so my home page didnβt drastically change. I even had a dedicated lurking account for browsing the NSFW subs.
You will stay here, and you will like it!
No, you cannot meaningfully delete your posts or comments, but that's not because of any issue with lemmy, but because you posted them publically. They will be archived and indexed in other services.
It is always best to remember that all your activity here is public, and will be linked to your username. Given that, you may wish to minimise any personally identifying information you post, and use several accounts to split up your activities by topic.
FYI there are some sites that index and archive some of the bigger lemmy instances fyi. I donβt know if this is the case for your instance but if you posted to say, lemmy.world there is a chance your post/comment is archived on a 3rd party site that you have 0 control over
Same issue reddit had, except not nearly as bad as reddit was very thoroughly archived prior to the api changes
Not really an issue. Engaging in public debate means you might be recorded. The important part is that with lemmy you can just make 10 accounts and be 10 different people unless you start doxxing yourself. Connecting your lemmy account to your digital and private person should be impossible unless law enforcement asks your hoster. But in that case you should be using other means anyway.
You can rotate throwaway accounts and/or use barcodes as a username
Aka. a combination of upper case i and lowwer case L
Aka
IlIIIllIlIlllI
I mean, it's not like we know who you are IRL, what exactly is the problem? Also, why can't it comfortably be a permanent digital footprint? Have you been posting things that reasonable people would side eye you for?