Comment by Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone on Warning: You cannot delete posts or comments on Lemmy. It stays up forever, and is in direct violation of GDPR and other national privacy laws.

Title says it. Apparently lemmy devs are not concerned with such worldly matters as privacy, or respecting international privacy laws.

That’s a pretty uncharitable interpretation, especially considering Lemmy is developed in and funded in part by the EU, and the “staying online forever” thing is a consequence of Federation (and one they’re working on remedying).

If you were worried about this sort of thing, perhaps you should have done your research about the platform before making an account so you could bitch about it here. You definitely don’t sound like the voice of reason when you couldn’t be arsed to figure this out before you made an account.

So you can’t make an account on this platform if you don’t agree with how it operates? By that logic no criticism of the platform by its users is possible, which is a great way to ensure it never gets better.

Edit: Let me make this clearer:

Saying in effect “yet you participate in lemmy” to dismiss the OP’s concerns is ridiculous. If this logic were taken to its endpoint, there would be no valid criticism of anything lemmy ever did.

Maybe that’s your goal, but I would rather not blindly defend lemmy because I like it. I’d rather make it better, and that starts with criticism.

I mean, yes?

If you do not agree to the terms of a service, do not use the service. This is the case for essentially every system ever. You can go complain about it on Reddit or something if you like.

Okay, since you clearly carefully read and completely agree and support eveything in the Lemmy TOS, please tell me where it says it will keep your comments forever.

You’ll find that in the ActivityPub specifications, actually, where delete messages are optional to implement.

The choice of how it implements ActivityPub’s optional components you’ll find in the Lemmy (or other Fediverse) source code.

So do we expect every user to read, understand, accept and agree with the specifications and source code of lemmy before they make an account, and having done so, never make any complaints about it?

This isn’t a difficult calculation - that person was effectively saying “yet you participate in lemmy” as a reason to dismiss any criticism. That should be on the face of it ridiculous. I don’t understand why anyone is taking their side except as a knee-jerk defense of their favourite platform.

Lemmy isn’t my favourite platform. Not even close. I’m not sure it’s even in my top ten.

What I am attacking is the rampant ignorance over a fundamental aspect of technology. A distributed system by its very nature has copies. Sometimes the copies last for a few milliseconds (think your router) and sometimes the copies last effectively forever (think the Internet Archive). And there is nothing you as the user can do to change this. There is also nothing that prevents someone from making the delete side of things not delete things. (Yes, this includes your router. How do you think “wiretaps” of modern digital communications systems work?)

In the case of ActivityPub this is even more egregious a level of ignorance. The entire point of federated software is to copy and spread content, so if you have even half a brain cell you’re going to have to know that there will be copies of everything you’ve ever posted on servers other than the one you posted it to. And yet we have stupid twats like the OP whining about the GDPR as if it is even slightly meaningful in a distributed system that crosses outside of EU’s jurisdiction.

I’m not saying that the terms can’t be more transparent, because they absolutely can be.

But if you have become aware of this practice and you continue to participate, you have de facto agreed to it. You can of course agree to the terms and continue to criticize them, but you don’t get to sign up for a soccer game and then claim that the rules against using your hands don’t actually apply to you. If you don’t want to face the consequences of how distributed services like this fundamentally work, don’t use them.

It took this person 20 days to post this. They didn’t create their account to post it the same day or even the next day, ergo, they figured it out after the fact.

If they really had an issue with stuff like this, why pray-tel weren’t they already doing their due diligence to ensure that the service they were signing up for didn’t violate the GDPR in ways they didn’t like? That seems like a gross oversight by someone clearly incensed by it.

(Also, it continues to be questionable whether it’s actually breaking GDPR rules, and even in that regard, it would be individual server admins responsible for enforcing GDPR compliance.)

(Also, it continues to be questionable whether it’s actually breaking GDPR rules, and even in that regard, it would be individual server admins responsible for enforcing GDPR compliance.)

Wow I can’t believe you’re criticising the policy that you agreed to when you made your account. Sounds like you need to delete your account and take that kind of talk elsewhere.

You know, it’s clear you’re not arguing in good faith or taking what I’ve said in good faith, instead of choosing the most uncharitable interpretation you can to get a “gotcha,” so I think we’re done here.

Also, it’s not a “policy” it’s literally a byproduct of how federation works. Sorry you completely fail to understand the architecture of this service and how that influences how it works. All ActivityPub services suffer from the same issue.

I don’t agree with that reasoning. It’s entirely possible for someone to be personally accepting of the Fediverse’s privacy issues, but make an intelligent, well informed, coherent critique of them.

Like perhaps the OP did? Seems like they had to personally accept the TOS, or at least tolerate it, but they also have a critique.

I also still don’t see how “yet you participate in lemmy” is a real answer.

I don’t think “yet you participate in Lemmy” is an especially good answer, either. The same reasoning applies.

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

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