I’ve been using federated social media for a while now and I recently considered setting up an instance for my local community as a sort of Facebook alternative. However, as I thought about it, I wondered if ActivityPub’s deletion problem (i.e. if a user deletes their content on their server it doesn’t guarantee the content being deleted on other servers) is a fatal flaw. I worry that it would be difficult to secure buy-in from people if they were made aware of this issue, which they have the right to. It does make me wonder if the ATProtocol will be the better protocol if and when it becomes open source.
I’m curious as to other drivers users’ thoughts. While it is an issue that we may be happy to live with given the numerous other benefits ActivityPub provides, is it a flaw that will ultimately prevent wide scale adoption?
If you think you might change your mind about sharing information, don’t put it in the Internet in the first place. Even if deletions always federated, it can be kept in dozens of other ways.
Yeah, my attitude towards this is that if I post something, I voluntarily lose control of it. Post accordingly.
It’s easily said, but there can be some serious ramifications to this. What if the thing that was ok to post about some years ago now becomes outlawed and the state uses posts from the past to identify now illegal behavior (e.g. LGBT issues, political opposition/opinions generally, consumption of some previously legal substance like cannabis, …)
The state might already have a copy of all your posts anyways to use that, but many states don’t.
It’s cute that you think they don’t have a copy of everything the instant you post it.
They literally have black box rooms inspecting all traffic in all the major internet POPs in the US.
Well I don’t live in the US
You do understand how networking works, yes? They are getting EVERYTHING that goes through a U.S. POP.
You’re rude
Yeah, they’ve got that recorded, too.
This is not so much an “ActivityPub problem” as it is just how things work when you move something from point A to point B. You can’t unsend an email (or physical mail) or untell a secret.
The idea that you can just delete something on a whim is an illusion created by the centralized silo networks, and it’s not even true those cases as it’s generally a soft delete, and archived by other means anyway.
This “fatal” flaw is hardly unique to ActivityPub. You fundamentally cannot control anything you publish on the internet. You can’t stop people from saving copies or taking screenshots, you can’t stop archive bots or LLM web scrapers, and you can’t force Lemmy instances to honor deletion requests.
Even on Reddit there’s been undeleters and archives since basically forever.
Even for regular websites, there’s always the Internet Archive.
It’s hardly a new problem: you always assumed the Internet was forever.
Update: So far many of the responses point out that if you post anywhere on the internet you are prone to this issue, i.e. even if you delete something someone may have copied it etc.
I do believe this is different. Yes, we are always at risk from malicious actors, but usually when using social media we can operate under the assumption that the delete button works. That is not the case for ActivityPub. Even without bad actors, your content may not be deleted. I think it’s safe to say that this is an unappealing issue for most potential users.
