I was thinking about this recently… By going to a federated system, one that essentially copies all of your content from one instance to another, when you delete a comment, does that comment get deleted on every instance? Is that even possible?

  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I think you have a pretty weird understanding of “privacy” if you think that you have it when posting a comment in a publicly-accessible forum.

    If you post it in a place I can find it, I can scrape it, store it, use it for my own putposes, in perpetuity. You might be able to convince a government to tell me to stop, but there is no guarantee I haven’t stored it somewhere you and they don’t know about.

    That’s simply the nature of information. You don’t get to control my memory. Once you’ve put an idea in my head, you don’t get to take it back. That idea you put in my head is now my idea. It’s my thought.

    You can’t unring the bell. You can keep a thought private, or you can post it. But once you’ve posted it, you can’t make it truly private again.