Partner and CEO of Find the Path Ventures (https://find-path.com). Voice actor, software engineer, and general nerd.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I’m not saying we shouldn’t be able to hard delete comments, I’m just explaining why the Lemmy developers might not have started with hard-deleting comments. I agree with you we should have the option and it should propagate regardless of any instance settings.

    My point in mentioning other servers not deleting your comments is that ActivityPub is an open standard. Technically someone can write a Lemmy competitor that federates with your instance and does not implement the hard deletion of comments. It’s allowable under the protocol. That doesn’t mean the feature isn’t worth implementing, it just means there are caveats to “this comment disappears off the Internet forever” like we’d like.





  • Software engineer here. Historically we started not hard-deleting anything because sometimes software does bad things and we never want to accidentally delete anything that could be important since then the only way to undo it is to restore the database from a backup. So it’s better/safer to literally not allow the application to ever delete anything from the database.

    That being said, I could see an option in ActivityPub to delete comments, but with the distributed nature of Lemmy you would have to trust every server you federate with to listed to the protocol and delete the comments too since they are stored on the other servers as well.





  • Not in its current form. Anyone who’s tried to start a tech company knows you have to make your solution simple to use. Making software easy to use is actually surprisingly hard, involving experts in user interfaces, a lot of thought on user onboarding and training.

    Lemmy as it currently stands is relatively new-user hostile for non-technical users. Content discovery isn’t very clear, people are confused about how to find communities to follow, and the mobile apps are barebones.

    That’s not to say it can’t get there, but until you never need to mention that the system is federated, I think a lot of people will be turned off from the complexity of using Lemmy. The community right now is motivated to use Lemmy and I would imagine a little more on the technical side, but getting your parents to use Lemmy or Mastadon would be a challenge currently.