You also know that all votes are technically public and can be viewed by any instance admin that's federated with the server a community is on, right? There's no way to see that in the Lemmy UI at the moment but the data is there on the server.

I mean you could say the same thing about reddit - anyone could scrape reddit and save comments and stuff, even if you later delete them.

If someone can see something on their computer, they can save it and you won't be able to take it away. I mean... it's just how the internet works.

The deletion should federate across almost all instances, but there's no guarantee and also someone will almost certainly one day set up an archive server that just listens to all activity on Lemmy like uneddit used to be for reddit.

That's pretty much how everything on the Internet works, FYI. Lemmy is just upfront about it

Lemmy and other services built on ActivityPub work by sending content to every server that hosts a user who has subscribed to a community or another user. Those servers could be anything from vanilla Lemmy hosted in a datacenter to an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of ActivityPub running on a jailbroken smart light bulb. Most of them will be online to receive a delete request and will handle it correctly most of the time, but that cannot be guaranteed.

Anything you share to the world that way is out in the world and cannot be reliably rescinded. Discussion groups implemented as email lists used to be popular, and the same was true there, but more so since there isn't a mechanism intended to edit or delete an email message after it is sent. Something similar is true of anything that functions as a public website; a great many things published to the web are available from sites like archive.org, like old forum posts.

I don’t know if this works on Lemmy, but Reddit used to be like this and a solution was to edit your comment to different text first (something like ‘I like turtles’), wait about a week to allow the new text to be archived, and then delete it.

‘I like turtles’ wasn’t special, but makes it easy to scroll through your comments later when deleting things.

In Lemmy, your username will still show up with deleted comments, but in theory the edited text will replace the original comment you want to delete in archived views. This method doesn’t work with post images, though.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, please.

e: I’ve edited this comment thrice in 2 hours. Can anyone tell, and can you differentiate my 3 edits?

Just assume anything you post here will be scraped by Facebook, Google, Amazon, the CIA and the CCP, regardless of what the Lemmy devs and admins let you do with your data.

It's a public forum. Once you post something there's no guarantee it will ever be gone.