I deleted them at about the same time, both on different instances. One is empty, from perspective of my new instance, but the other one shows all the posts. What am I supposed to do? I share some of my personal stuff online as means of venting so I can possibly reflect through unbiased responses from strangers and I’m comfortable with it, as long as I have control over my “content”, so to speak. I’m not sure what to do now.
Unfortunately, once you share something online it’s moved beyond anyone’s control. Even if the platform respects your wishes and does everything right, there’s always 3rd party web crawlers, data harvesters, archival services, etc. They are always around, busily vacuuming up everything they can on the web. Few if any shared posts or comments will ever be truly deleted. Storage of text is cheap, and a lot of entities love hoarding data.
So, try to only post stuff you wouldn’t mind your parents, coworkers, friends, etc. knowing about. Corporations and governments are moving more and more towards 100% surveillance and away from privacy and anonymity. It’s a giant problem, and I hate it. But the only element of this you can control is your own behavior.
I genuinely don’t mind it existing somewhere not available easily. But I mind it being stored out in the open when I took the steps to have it removed. To censor oneself is an awful, very mentally unhealthy advice. Had I not used the Internet the ways I do, I’d probably be long gone. Internet is a great space for free alternative therapy (and normal therapy is very expensive and nowhere as efficient). I knew this comment would come, but I chose to let it happen so I could respond. If you wish to not be yourself, feel free to! I choose to embrace myself for my own sake.
How long ago did you delete it? Deletions are federated just like anything else, so it can take a while for deletions to federate out to all instances sometimes. Deleted accounts are particularly hard-hitting on instance resources because it’s a lot of changes all at once. Small instances can actually go down for a few seconds when a large account gets deleted somewhere on the Fediverse.
As with all things open source it’ll probably improve slowly but steadily over time.
What happens if the posts were from an instance that was later defederated from the current instance?
Or was running an old (and now incomparable) version of the software?
If two instances defederate, then the servers aren’t “talking” to each other anymore, meaning anything after defederation doesn’t get synced. So yeah, if you had an account, then your instance defederated, and then you deleted the account, your posts from before could still be theorhetically readable on the defederated instance. Admins can easily purge accounts from the database, so it wouldn’t hurt to reach out if you said something regretfull that was still visible.
I don’t think the second scenario is capable of happening (yet) since ActivityPub is backwards compatible.
If that matters, one of them had last activity about 3 months ago (I lost password and reset wasn’t working) and the other one had more recent activity. The one which had more recent activity seems correctly purged of my posts, but the 3 months old activity one is still up.
