this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Serious Question - Is the ActivityPub deletion problem a fatal flaw? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 2 days ago by RideAgainstTheLizard@slrpnk.net to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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?

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[–] RideAgainstTheLizard@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The fact that the delete button can only guarantee deletion on your own server is not robust considering one of the primary appeals of the fediverse is that servers can communicate with each other. It means unease/distrust is built in from square one.

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Communicating with each other does not mean you can withdraw your post from everywhere.

Every public post in the never can and will be copied elsewhere, be it the Internet archive, a reddit mirror, a screenshot on Tumblr, Google search index or some scraping AI. You have zero say in this and you are not able to withdraw it - even if there's some law that says you can, in many cases you don't even know about the copy. And if you send a letter and ask them to delete it, they can say yes but you can't know for sure.

There's no way to guarantee someone will delete something you sent them. They'll always be able to take a copy.

The fediverse can't do that either. Nobody can. But the fediverse has a specified way to tell "this post isn't here anymore, would be cool if you would delete it as well" and for the biggest part, other instances will respect that.

[–] RideAgainstTheLizard@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's fair. Say you were setting up a server and you planned to migrate users to it, and it was going to be their first experience of the fediverse, do you think this is something you'd feel obligated to tell them about?

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 3 points 2 days ago

Obligated? It depends on the users a bit (since you say migrating, I guess I already know them?).

But generally a reminder won't hurt. Not everyone gets educated on digital spaces and also we tend to forget which consequences our posts might have.

You mentioned young people as an example who should be able to fuck up without it being held against them too long and I agree. I think public social media might not be the best place for that in general, and certainly not with names that can easily be mapped to their offline id.