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PSA: You can't delete photos uploaded to Lemmy. So don't (accidentally) upload a nude
(tech.michaelaltfield.net)
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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You can't delete any text in comments or posts either - or at least not reliably, as any federated instance could choose to ignore deletions.
You should basically consider what you write or post here public, and probably public for good. But here's the thing - same goes for the entire rest of the Internet as well, basically.
I didnt know about that. This is a bit scary to be honest, and the first time I feel a bit taken aback with lemmy
I don’t know if this works on Lemmy, but Reddit used to be like this and a solution was to edit your comment to different text first (something like ‘I like turtles’), wait about a week to allow the new text to be archived, and then delete it.
‘I like turtles’ wasn’t special, but makes it easy to scroll through your comments later when deleting things.
In Lemmy, your username will still show up with deleted comments, but in theory the edited text will replace the original comment you want to delete in archived views. This method doesn’t work with post images, though.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, please.
e: I’ve edited this comment thrice in 2 hours. Can anyone tell, and can you differentiate my 3 edits?
On the front end this still theoretically works, but it's unclear when (if ever) reddit respected it on the back end. They might have an archive of all the text ever put on the site.
I don’t know how their backend works, but as a former db admin, it seems wasteful to maintain that many layers of change for every user. I would certainly do that in a mission-critical system, but for millions of pseudo-anonymous users, many of whom are shitposters, that would be an insane waste of server space.
That may be true, but I would be a bit surprised if there were a change-log like that.
e: keep in mind, systems like this don’t just work like that – you’d have to do extra work to build it that way on purpose. And you’d be doing that extra work, maintenance, and hosting for a user base who aren’t paying you, in a system you’re giving away for free, in Lemmy’s case.
Knowing how comments get changed is immensely interesting data. And if you design a system from the ground up, adding the functionality to save edits in the backend does not take much effort at all.
Sure, and I can see keeping the last edit (which it obviously does), but every edit? That seems ridiculous if only for the hosting costs.
Really? What do you expect is the edit rate on sites like Lemmy and reddit? One in ten comments? I think more like one in 30 or something. That would increase the storage costs by 3% and a small amount of processing power.
Hosting costs are dwarfed by media storage anyway.
If you’re building a system to allow change-log levels of editing, you have to allow for a significant portion of your user base using it, whether or not they do.
That will add fail points and hosting that’s wholly unnecessary to code and maintain, regardless of what percentage you think will use those features.
Have you ever been in charge of distributed large-scale systems like that with millions of users? I have. That would be bonkers.
Hold up, I think we have a discrepancy regarding what we are talking about.
I'm not thinking of anything user facing. The ux would be exactly identical to what is publicly observable on reddit already. I'm talking about the possibility to dump any change to comments or posts into a cold data store for later analysis. We don't have to question or think how many users would make use of it, we can count the fraction of comments with an "edited" label on reddit.
Under GDPR you can just send a request for them to send you all of the data that they’ve stored about you on their backend.