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PSA: You can't delete photos uploaded to Lemmy. So don't (accidentally) upload a nude
(tech.michaelaltfield.net)
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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I feel like, after over a decade of smartphones and snapchat and such, a younger generation needs to be thought better what putting content on the Internet means on a fundamental level, and those of us old enough to remember the more open web need to be reminded.
If you don't want everyone to see it, and I mean everyone, then you shouldn't put it online. For all intents and purposes, once you hit send, it's now a part of the internet. You might get lucky and be able to remove it, but that's the exception, not the rule.
Sometimes views on things change and maybe some picture or other content you posted now makes you a target in some way that it didn't before. You don't always know how things will change in the future and adding such a highly expected piece of functionality like deleting something you uploaded should probably be more highly prioritized.
Let's be clear that this problem has nothing to do with Lemmy or the Lemmy devs. This is not a problem of prioritisation and it is not something that can just be fixed.
This is a problem of ActivityPub and the nature of federated services. There is just no way you force a federated server to delete something. So while most servers are well behaved, others might not be. Such servers could be defederated but you need to detect such bad behaviour first.
The problem is not with Lemmy, it's the whole Fediverse and ultimately also the Internet that works like this.
(the problem of a user uploading a photo and never posting it anywhere and wanting that to be deleted should be fixable though)
Yeah, that makes sense. I didn't really have the full scope of the issue in my mind when I wrote my comment. Thanks for giving some extra perspective.
I agree with your core concept.
But this is a pretty wild flaw. The fact that even an admin can't reliably delete photos from their own instance? That's begging to be exploited by bad actors. What happens when it's porn (whether kids or unconsenting adults)? It's core functionality that you have to have.
Admins can definitely delete photos from their own instance. The problem is deleting it from all instances; that is hard.
This post provides a fairly detailed claim of the opposite. Federation isn't part of the issue he's referring to at all. It's that deleting the image post doesn't delete the direct link to the file, and that doing so as an admin is really convoluted. He goes through the issue and his effort with an admin trying to help in a decent bit of detail.
I can't actually test myself because I don't have a server, but as far as I'm concerned the issue he's claiming is a complete showstopper.
It's not super straight forward, that's true. But it's not that hard I would say. But I'm a professional software engineer, I dunno if all admins find it as easy.
It's also hard for admins to delete it from their own instance:
This is just a feature request to do it via the web interface, you can still do it manually on the server without too much effort.