Why YSK: On reddit only the body was editable, so by knowing this you won’t need to delete or resubmit due to wrong URL, typo, etc.

  • Kibo@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    I wonder if seeing the handles of the users who deleted their comments on some Lemmy apps is a feature or a bug.

    • cyanarchy
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      1 year ago

      That’s the default behavior here on my home instance, I’ve noticed. If I delete a comment, it’s still shown that I was there, so I find myself thinking it over more.

      • Kibo@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Oh so it’s got to do with instance and not the apps? I didn’t think that was the case since I could see those names in some apps and not the others. Must have been in different instances then.

        So even if we’re from different instances our handles will still show up if we post and delete comments in other instances that keep the handles visible?

        Edit: just did a test under this comment and I still see my handle.

        • cyanarchy
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          1 year ago

          That’s a good question, and I don’t know any of the specifics, but the apps are doing their best to implement features provided by each instance, and federation is made possible by way of their common underlying code (ActivityPub). When things act up in the app it’s likely because different instances handle different things locally. Voting is a good example, some instances and communities effectively turn it off.

          • Kibo@aussie.zone
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            1 year ago

            One of the things I like about Reddit is that you could remove whatever you’ve posted as and when you want, at least on the surface level. I’d definitely want my username to not be visible once I’ve deleted my comments. Call me paranoid but I have a habit of deleting comments that reveal too much personal info (e.g. “I’m an abc working in xyz…” or “my abc is suffering from xyz…”) every once in a while but if a particular comment has already been quoted and replied by many then deleting it but still keeping my username would mean that people can still more or less guess the original content and trace it back to me.

            • cyanarchy
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              1 year ago

              You should probably know that deleting your comments on reddit is pretty ineffective. They don’t discard the actual content of your post from their database, and there are websites whose sole purpose is to host undelete archives of reddit threads. I can’t verify this but I’ve also heard they’re rolling back a lot of comment deletion after the recent drama.

              That’s the part I don’t really get about people’s attachment to reddit identities, in hindsight that’s a ten year history of things I was dumb enough to share on the internet and I’d gladly wipe that slate clean if it were a real option.

        • cyanarchy
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          1 year ago

          My understanding is that some of these things are less explicit desired functionality and more oversights that simply haven’t yet become worth the developer effort they would take to remove from the codebase.

          • bastian_5
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            1 year ago

            Actually, I just thought about it, and I think there should be an option to have partial deletions. either way it’s not as bad as I initially thought because you always can just edit your comment to say just “[deleted]” manually

            • cyanarchy
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              1 year ago

              Ultimately I think it’s a moot point. The nature of the fediverse means that any time you make a post, that information propagates across multiple servers and databases. Any of those might be backed up, scraped, defederated from, or temporarily brought offline. Anything you purport to create, edit, or delete can be stuck in any conceivable intermediate state, entirely outside of your awareness or control without recourse.

              This isn’t reddit, this data doesn’t become the property and responsibility of a single centralized entity. Everyone would be best served to return to the old internet adage that anything you publish should be considered permanent and public.