Comment on [PSA] Lemmy account deletion is a mess
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 days agoSure. Question is: How can we improve that? Is this a symptom for another missing feature? Or do we want to not address it and just provide one nuclear option? Would you for example like a feature for ephermeral comments, which auto-destruct after a week or so? PieFed has something like that for posts. Or the ability to categorize comments so you can find them later on? Or an option to (regularly) wipe your history, so you don't have to delete the whole account...
That's why I ask for exact reasons, and not just a vague feeling about how the platform is bad... I mean it is for some edge-cases like this. And I don't see how Lemmy would improve on this in the near future. Seems some of the groundworks still don't work properly. But this doesn't have to apply to other Fediverse software.
pseudo@jlai.lu 3 days ago
I want erasure of my content to be full erasure. If I delete an account unless state otherwise, I want its content to be wipe out. I want the comment I delete to be fully delete not just the word replace. If I deleted it there should not be in a database the time, date of a comment and my name associates to a “deleted by user” comment. There should be no comment at all and no possibility to store information related to what should not exist at all.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 days ago
Fair enough. I guess we can skip the other options then, at least for your case. The replacement isn't very thoughtful. For technical reasons, you can't have it your way either. A platform with tree-style comments or replies can't have a comment in-between deleted entirely, or the rest of the tree will collapse. So there needs to be some empty placeholder. Or you just can't use platforms which allow users to reply to each other, but that's more a you-problem. I agree though, if you delete it, it can't have your username or content or timestamp left behind.