hendrik

Two things to consider:

• It’s likely illegal to take other people’s content and re-publish it on your own terms
• Peertube admins have to pay for storage. So don’t dump random noise there. It has to be useful / worth it. Especially if you make someone else pay for the server space.

I’m not sure what OP meant but I think none of the comments here are nailing it. If we say, we can’t do anything unless it’s 100% certain that all instances comply with the protocol, we might scrap the whole Fediverse idea altogether. Any post or comment or vote or deletion could be tempered with in one way or another. I mean we’re clearly making an effort here to do federation. I don’t really agree with the why and how of the whole discussion. My own point is, the software seems to have some bugs. Rarely, some comments and posts don’t federate to me correctly, and more often than that, deletions don’t federate correctly. Which seems to be one of OP’s problems, but also while dealing with spam or malicious activities.

On the other hand, everyone who thinks it’s super easy to just delete everything has never had a look at the consequences. Moderators and Admins sometimes need to deal with bad people, there are technical reasons involved. And bad people also misuse features. It’s complicated for several reasons, difficult to get it right and it’s always a balance between opposing legitimate interests.

But with that said, this doesn’t apply to bugs. Lemmy should at least iron out the software bugs to federate activities to other instances properly.

Fair enough. I guess we can skip the other options then, at least for your case. The replacement isn’t implemented in a very thoughtful way, I agree. For technical reasons, you can’t have it your way either. A platform with tree-style comments or replies can’t have a comment in-between deleted entirely, or the rest of the tree will collapse. So there needs to be some empty placeholder. Or you just can’t use platforms which allow users to reply to each other, but that’s more a you-problem. I agree though, if you delete it, it can’t have your username or content left behind. Thanks for raising this concern. I’m not sure if anyone ever put it on the agenda for Lemmy.

Sure. Question is: How can we improve? Is this a symptom for another missing feature? Or do we want to not address it and just provide one nuclear option? Would you for example like a feature for ephermeral comments, which auto-destruct after a week or so? PieFed has something like that for posts. Or the ability to categorize comments so you can find them later on? Or an option to (regularly) wipe your history, so you don’t have to delete the whole account…

That’s why I ask for exact reasons, and not just a vague feeling about how the platform is bad… I mean it is for some edge-cases like this. And I don’t see how Lemmy would improve on this in the near future. Seems some of the groundworks still don’t work properly. But this doesn’t have to apply to other Fediverse software.

And sometimes I struggle to relate. I for example don’t post anything on social media that’s very private in nature. So I don’t really have the use-case where I post someting publicly on social media, but then I want it gone at the same time. I suppose we just post different things, because I can see how you wouldn’t have your daily state of mind available forever.

Exactly. And I sometimes find myself in the position where internet enshittification and content vanishing harms me more than it helps. So I’d like to balance this with the other side of the medal, where people might have legitimate interest to do so. But so far the argument has been “just because”. And for me, that argument doesn’t tip the scale to their direction. I still have tangible arguments not to over-delete. While the other side seems to be very theoretical.

Tl;dr: Yes, it’s complicated.

Hmmh. I think 1) just means it has to be implemented properly. But you’re right. That sounds exactly like something a developer would do. Unlink the information and at the same time add a timestamp that immediately links it again 😅

And I’m not sure about 3) I’d have to read the GDPR again. Afaik it just mandates the user is provided with the ability to do so. Not that it needs to be the default.

And 2) is kind of my question. I suppose a user who is about to delete their account, might not be super relaxed and ready to deal with the intricate details. I mean they could be pissed and want out asap. Or something happened and they need to get it over with, quickly. Either way, it’s probably not the right time to bother them with 500 questions and make them learn about the consequences. Though… They need to do the right thing. Once their account is gone, and it turns out they would have liked to delete more (or less), that’s not really possible any more (without manual admin intervention). So maybe it’s down to: delete everything in any case, and accept that it has a negative effect on the content on the platform.

It also has to be balanced with handling abuse etc since malicious actors use the same features to cover their tracks.

But I’m probably getting way ahead of where we are. OP said deletion doesn’t even propagate through the federated network correctly. So realistically, we probably don’t need to bother with the details several steps down the line.

Good use-case. Would it suffice to “unlink” the information in that case, instead of deleting it? I think that’d solve both problems. The posts and comments would stay in place for everyone to keep using them, but it’d say “by [deleted user]”, so it’s forgotten that you (or someone) wrote it.

I’m not sure. And we somehow need to present that to the user without overwhelming them with several options, delete account without data, delete account and unlink content, delete account and content…

Hmmh, not sure if I’m experiencing a Déjà vu, or if this is just because I’ve talked to some people who were complaining about some aspect of the platform and saying they’re going to quit. Anyways, I wish that you’re somehow going to find what you’re looking for. Whether it’s on this platform or somewhere else.

Seems to me like you’re having an on-and-off relationship. And those often turn out to be… difficult?

Out of curiosity: What’s a reason to delete all the content? I don’t want to imply you shouldn’t be able to do so… But I often find it very annoying when people delete large quantities of stuff. Because that also deletes the comments I made, which took me time to write. It deletes my bookmarks. And sometimes people wipe their history regularly, which removes technical questions along with the correct answers and other material that might prove useful to other people, if it weren’t deleted… And I had things that I’d have liked to return to, vanish into thin air multiple times now.

I’d like to understand the perspectives and two sides of that coin. And since you say you’d like to delete content, I thought I’d ask about your perspective and the why…

I think interoperability works with centralized services as well. They can offer an API for other services to hook into. Like Reddit had different apps, bots, tools… You can connect your software to the Google cloud, even if it’s made by a different company… I think interoperability works just fine with both models, at least on the technical side.

I’d say this is unlikely to work out. It mainly combines the downsides of two approaches. The centralization will make it less free and diverse and gives power to few people, while the decentralization adds unnecesary complexity. Since at that point it’s mainly one large instance, but that has to send out loads of network traffic to very few people at other places to keep them in the loop. At that point, why not make it 100% centralized? That’d make programming and maintainance way easier.

You should pick a different community. I don’t think this is going to get appreciated here.

But kudos for probably hitting the character limit like 2 minutes after creating the account.

I share your opinion. They seem to have clarified a few things, though. Their license states what kind of reuse is allowed. You need to read it thoroughly. For example you can study the code or adapt it for personal hobby projects, if it’s non-commercial and you add the required statements… But I think it’s completely unappealing to use GrayJay or contribute to the project. It’s not Free Software, so you don’t get much in return. They tell you you should send pull requests, but as far as I can see there is no way of logging in to their GitLab. So you somehow need to hunt down their GitHub mirror, and file something there, in the hopes someone is going to read it amongst the hundreds and hundreds of open bugreports… And their phrasing and use of the term “open source” is just annoying and bound to confuse people. I’m not sure what Louis Rossman is doing these days, but when they launched it, he was making videos with lots of outright false claims about the licensing. A lot of that hasn’t been ideal. I’ve sent them some comments back in 2023. But they never replied directly. I believe they took notice of the discussion and promised to step up their game concerning their community. But I don’t think they’re doing a particularly good job. And I suspect they lack a deeper understanding of what Free Software is, what it’s about and good at, how to foster a community that’s not just alike what you get on Youtube as a creator.

But I’m not mad at them. As long as they keep Louis’ promise of not prosecuting any individual for getting confused by their mixed signals. They seem to be mildly successful with whoever their target audience is. Guess I’m just not a part of that. But I have NewPipe/Tubular, my browser with the proper Ad-blocking in place, so I can live a comfortable life without GrayJay.

Don’t they? I’m aware of the events that took place when they released it. But seems they’ve solved licensing by now. There is a License.md in that repo since a few months. FUTO seems to even have written blog posts about their licensing, detailing why they do it. In short: They like to call it open source, while it’s not. It’s source available. Seems from their posts, they mainly want to exclude commercial use, but I’m not sure about their legalese, and the actual license text restricts how people can share and modify it. But the licensing is there by now. It’s just not an open source project. But I agree, they still like to confuse users and twist the meaning of words.

Agreed. And the default UI hasn’t even gotten attention in the past. It’s just there. My experience with Lemmy has been that the devs fix bugs, but they’re mostly focused on the backend. I’m not sure about the consequences, though. A lot of people seem to be using phone apps, so their default might not even be Lemmy’s UX.

Though, I’d argue if we were awesome and had something truly nice to offer, we’d grow on our own. And not just if someone else messes up and becomes unbearable. But it’s complicated.

Idk, Lemmy also inreased it’s userbase by a factor of 30, mainly from a single event. It had like 1,500 MAU before summer 2023 and now we’re at 45k. So I’m not sure what to make of this. I kinda agree though, it’ll stabilize at a lower number than during a hype period. And Pixelfed aside, the more popular places on the Fediverse seem to be stagnating right now. I hope we’ve learned from the past and drama that happened and we don’t need to repeat the same things.

I don’t think that’ll work. Asking for consent and retrieving the robots.txt is yet another request with a similar workload. So by that logic, we can’t do anything on the internet. Since asking for consent is work and that requires consent, which requires consent… And if you’re concerned with efficiency alone, cut the additional asking and complexity by just straightforward doing the single request.

Plus, it’s not even that complex. Sending a few bytes of JSON with daily precalculated numbers is a fraction of what a single user interaction does. It’s maybe zero point something of a request. Or with a lots of more zero’s in-between if we look at what a server does each day. I mean every single refresh of the website or me opening the app loads several files, API endpoints, regularly loads hundreds of kilobytes of Javascript, images etc. There are lots of calculations and database requests involved to display several posts along with votes etc. I’d say one single pageview of me counts like the FediDB collecting stats each day for like 1000 years.

I invented these numbers. They’re wrong. But I think you get what I’m trying to say… For all practical purposes, these requests are for free and have zero cost. Plus if it’s efficiency, it’s always a good idea not to ask to ask, but outright do it and deal with it while answering. So it really can’t be computational cost or network traffic. It has to be consent.

(And in developer terms, some things don’t even add up. Computers can do billions of operations each second. Network infrastructure can handle somewhere in the ballpark of millions(?) of packets a second. And we’re talking about a few of them a day, here. I’d say this is more like someone moving grains of sand in the Sahara with their bare hands. You could do it all your life and it wouldn’t really change anything. For practical purposes, it’s meaningless on that scale.)

I think the sane approach is: the developers offer one good theme and branding that is the default setting and works well out of the box. And instance administrators can then either be lazy and leave that in place, or (better) go ahead and tweak their place to their liking. Decorate it, make it unique if they like. I think it shows how much effort someone put into something. But on the other hand, you often can’t mess with 20 different free software projects and change the CSS code just for the sake of it. I think it’s also fine to just leave some things on a good default setting.

Hmmh, I don’t think we’ll come to an agreement here. I think marriage is a good example, since that comes with lots of implicit consent. First of all you expect to move in together after you got engaged. You do small things like expect to eat dinner together. It’s not a question anymore whether everyone cooks their own meal each day. And it extends to big things. Most people expect one party cares for the other once they’re old. And stuff like that. And yeah. Intimacy isn’t granted. There is a protocol to it. But I’m way more comfortable to make the moves on my partner, than for example place my hands on a stranger on the bus, and see if they take my invitation…

Isn’t that how it works? I mean going with your analogy… Sure, you can marry someone and never touch each other or move in together. But that’s kind of a weird one, in my opinion. Of course you should be able to do that. But it might require some more explicit agreement than going the default route. And I think that’s what happened here. Assumptions have been made, those turned out to be wrong and now people need to find a way to deal with it so everyone’s needs are met…

I just can’t relate. Doesn’t being in a relationship change things? It sure did for me. And I surely act differently around my partner, than I do around strangers. And I’m pretty sure that’s how most people handle it. And I don’t even think this is the main problem in this case.