I enjoy deleting my old posts and comments, but it’s lot of work doing it individually, especially with comments. For other platforms there are apps you can login with, then delete old or all content, but I can’t find one for Lemmy. Does such a thing even exist?
This might be tricky, given that Lemmy is federated. There’s no guarantee that deletions will be federated to all instances.
Even if the deletion request is federated - what stops me from using a modified server that ignores them and stores them anyways?
$$$
If you don’t mind answering, out of curiosity, why do you want to mass delete your old comments?
I can’t answer for OP, but for me personally, I like to delete my old stupid takes, and other than that, sometimes you have to share some personal info ( describe yourself, where you’re coming from… etc ) for the sake of having a healthy discussion, that could accumulate and leads to exposing your real identity to… say an employer
I also delete my posts and comments periodically. But it seems it’s pointless due to federation. Sometimes I get a reply to my comment from someone on some server, despite “deleting” it long time ago. The other instances simply do not delete stuff for one reason or another.
Can’t you just edit the content and write ‘deleted’ then saving it? Won’t the federate everything to just say ‘deleted’ instead of actually deleting it which doesn’t delete it from all servers?
I’ve found edits don’t federate consistently.
Given that so much depends on the implementation details of the various instances I’m not sure anything more than a “best effort” is possible.
I wouldn’t post anything that would be a problem.
Oh, that’s really bad, they should honor your delete requests, I think Matrix is much better in that regard…
I’ve written a small program to do that for me on a schedule. Deletes on Lemmy are pretty unreliable, though, so I’m not sure if I’ll ever clean up the code enough to release it into the wild.
Many Lemmy servers fail to process/blatantly ignore deletion requests, though. That’s why the program also sends an edit, though that also gets ignored occasionally. Deletes in a federated system are just a request, nothing more, and that request often gets silently ignored.
I enjoy deleting my old posts and comments
You do you I guess
Btw, it’s super annoying if I bookmark something, or remember something, check out the old post and the author deleted it. Happend more than once to me already. I mean it’s your content and your choice. Just wanted to say it’s annoying to me.
my stuff isn’t bookmarkworthy 😅
Might not be for you.
Maybe as an alternative for you: create new accounts after one year or so to not leave a years-long data trail? This way your posts are preserved but can’t be connected easily to each other to doxx you.
There aren’t that many users doing this, and I’m abysmal at remembering names. I’d say it’s a 1/3 chance it was you. It was someone usually writing silly stuff or participating in memes and random talk, with the one-off meaningful contribution, software or website recommendation or something. I forgot, and I think I removed the bookmark… But I’m not trying to convince you. You do you. If you like it this way, I totally respect that.
If I’m linking to a personal blog or something that may not have long legs I sometimes take a snapshot on web.archive.org.
I still link to the site directly so they get the traffic and visitors get any updates they might make but I know that if the direct link dies the page, as it was then, is still available for anyone who looks it up.
