It just feels kind of gross having parts of me hanging out on the internet for too long. Like I haven’t been able to wash my hands/face for a while. I do it manually occasionally, but I have to block off a morning or evening for it now when I used to be able to do it with a couple mouse clicks then go off to take a shit or w/e.

  • Hot SaucermanEnglish
    29•1 year ago

    I don’t think so, I think people are more concerned with having tools to switch their username/posts/comments from one server to another.

    Also, in general, if you don’t want it “on the internet too long” you probably just shouldn’t post it. Anyone can scrape that data in the time it was posted. It’s never really gone if someone else doesn’t want it gone. *shrugs

    • ScrubblesEnglish
      9•1 year ago

      Yeah… the concept of “deleted” was never really a thing on the internet and I don’t think it is still. If you don’t want it to be on the internet forever… don’t post it. Lemmy is pseudoanonymous, just choose a different username and 99% likely no one will ever know it’s you.

      • aedallaOP
        3•1 year ago

        I don’t wash my hands at work to be sterile (most of the time). “Sterile” is different from “clean” in the terms I’m formally educated in. To follow that analogy I just want my info to be “clean.” I want to remove most of the stuff from immediate public access periodically. I utilize other stuff too like periodically changing usernames and whatnot, same as I change an isolation gown or strip and wash my clothes as soon as I get home. None of that guarantees perfect removal of 100% of microbes, and this won’t prevent all people ever from accessing my info. But that’s no reason to never even rinse my digital ass. I just want a digital-ass bidet, not a digital autoclave.

    • aedallaOP
      2•1 year ago

      I don’t wash my hands at work to be sterile (most of the time). “Sterile” is different from “clean” in the terms I’m formally educated in. To follow that analogy I just want my info to be “clean.” I want to remove most of the stuff from immediate public access periodically. I utilize other stuff too like periodically changing usernames and whatnot, same as I change an isolation gown or strip and wash my clothes as soon as I get home. None of that guarantees perfect removal of 100% of microbes, and this won’t prevent all people ever from accessing my info. But that’s no reason to never even rinse my digital ass. I just want a digital-ass bidet, not a digital autoclave.

  • all-knight-party
    27•1 year ago

    Theoretically, you can’t. If text you posted federates out to other servers deleting it locally won’t delete it out there, I don’t believe.

    So, once it’s up, it’s up, wasting evenings deleting your stuff won’t really stop it

    • NaNEnglish
      32•1 year ago

      Deletions do propagate, but an instance doesn’t have to respect that.

    • @Raisin8659English
      10•1 year ago

      Also, it appears that sometimes, the deletion fails, and the request doesn’t get federated, leaving the comment/post orphaned.

  • HousePantherEnglish
    9•1 year ago

    This doesn’t work because of the decentralized nature of lemmy. Once it’s posted it is there. You can delete it from your the instance that you’re on but it won’t immediately - if at all - take effect on other instances.

  • Luke
    6•1 year ago

    I’m not convinced that those deletion tools work on Reddit either; there’s nothing stopping Reddit (or whatever site you’re trying to scrub) from restoring your edits (which they’ve done to lots of people recently) or even just viewing the older version of your comment that is still present in their database without publicly showing that text.

    Just because you’ve used some script that claims to scrub your data doesn’t mean it did so. At most you may have toggled an is_deleted=true flag, or added another edit entry to the table your original comment was stored in, but that doesn’t mean nobody has your data anymore.

    The only way to be sure nobody can ever see your post history is to never make posts in the first place.

    • @Michal@discuss.tchncs.de
      4•1 year ago

      I used one of those to edit all my comments and then delete them. Then i requested my data under GDPR and all original comments are there.