I understand that very few (or no) websites actually delete anything. They just mark them as “deleted”. But this usually means that once something is deleted, users have no ability to see the deleted data. This doesn’t seem to be the case with Lemmy.
I’ve been trying out the Android app called Connect for Lemmy, and it shows the contents of all deleted comments with a “DELETED” word on them. See the uploaded screenshot.
This seems bad to me. Users expect that deleted comments are no longer viewable, and won’t be returned by Lemmy’s API. Lemmy still shows the username of the deleted comments, which was bad enough, but now I’m seeing that it doesn’t prevent apps from seeing the deleted comments.
What are your thoughts on this?
Because of federation, I suspect they can’t just disappear. But they should lose their content and be marked as deleted, rather than viewable.
I don’t see why a delete command couldn’t be federated in exactly the same way an upvote or comment is.