Title says it. Apparently lemmy devs are not concerned with such worldly matters as privacy, or respecting international privacy laws.
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.
Yeah, okay, see that’s a genuine, principled and material explanation with what’s wrong with the OP’s complaint, and I agree. The laws don’t make a lot of sense.
What I don’t agree with, and I think it should be at least as obvious as the point you just made, is that the response, “you can’t make this complaint because you made an account here” is just thoroughly bankrupt. Of course people can make criticisms of the platform whilst having an account here.
Also though, your explanation that it’s in the specs and source code seems like a tacit admission that it’s not in the TOS, so appealing to some supposedly informed agreement to those TOS is doubly wrong.
