How is this possible?

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    8 months ago

    Some apps, especially Sync, will download one or more pages of content for quick interaction to local storage. If you download that stuff before they get deleted, they’re on your phone.

    Some foreign servers either don’t receive deletes, bug out when dealing with deletes, or refuse to do the delete. It’s kind of a dice roll whether or not actually get removed from other servers after deletion. If your home server didn’t delete the comment that another home server asked to delete, and your app connects to your home server, the comment will stick around of course.

    If you want to delete stuff from Lemmy, a) assume it doesn’t work (because malicious servers can just ignore deletion requests) and b) edit your comment to be near-empty before hitting the delete button, as edits seem to propagate the fediverse much better. This still won’t purge your comment from any malicious server, of course, as all ActivityPub messages between servers are normally requests, not commands.

    Also, be aware that server administrators (of any server connected to the server you posted on) can see deleted comments, and even restore them locally.