I like sharing my thoughts and struggles here, but I don’t want it to be a permanent digital footprint and wish to delete all the posts and comments one day.
No.
If you post it on the internet, it’s there forever.
If this were really true, why is there the existence of link rot and a large volume of online lost media?
I think the proper way to say this is that “if you post it on the internet, you should consider it being there forever”.
For example - a personal one. I did a short ambient music podcast series highlighting artists who release music via Creative Commons (a new thing at the time). It was only 5 episodes, and I have the first one archived. The other four are now completely lost to time, despite being put out on the internet back then. It’s not there forever.
In terms of social media, it’s harder to not be forever, but even that’s down to the same issues - has someone else archived it, screenshotted, especially in the case of a site ceasing to function? Internet Archive doesn’t preserve everything either. Plenty of archived pages missing images or files that enable true functionality to view everything as it was.
That maxim is no longer true, especially in the medium-to-long term. Reddit posts older than 8 or so years old aren’t accessible (even to their creators), same with the original Digg posts. If you go back to the Usenet days, most posts haven’t been archived and are lost, especially those from the smaller newsgroups. I expect over the coming decades, we’ll see data loss as a growing issue.
Its probably in a government database somewhere, it’s only inaccessible to you.
Reminds me of this joke (with a modern digital-era spin):
The son is accused of drug trafficking
The father: “I can’t access the cloud drive account on [Site Name]”
The son: “If you ever remember the password and get in, delete the account. That’s where my (drug trade) ledger is”
Overnight, the FBI filed subpoena to the cloud company requesting a copy of any files on any of [the father]'s accounts. Within days, the company compiled and send the info to the FBI.
[The son]'s defence attorney got a copy of the files due to the discovery process, and passed it on to the father.
The father: “Son, I don’t know how, but your lawyer just sent me an email this afternoon with all the family photos”
(Original Thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/37145912/18347741)
Even if you managed to delete the posts from all federated servers, they will still be archived in various places like the wayback machine and similar.
Better to only post what you’re comfortable sharing forever.
Harder here than on centralized platforms because everything you posted here has been copied to other servers which might ignore your requests to delete things.
Is there any such lemmy alternative with similar crowd?
You could continue using Lemmy.
To maintain anonymity:
Create a new account over Tor or No-Log VPN, never log in using a Real IP address, never share personal identifiable information, and never share your username (or instance name) with anyone IRL.
When using any public forum, you cannot resonably expect privacy, but anonymity is what you should be looking for.
No.
As redwizard said, you can edit all your posts and request a purge, but that doesn’t mean that the administrators of instances federated with yours will actually do so.
It’s also trivial to have a private fork whose purge process is “log that a purge was requested for the following db items”.
Federation means you can never vanish. Even if it did, people screenshot stuff now more than ever.
