Is there any truth to this?

Lemmy is a service for the purpose of publishing your posts & comments to servers that are outside of your control or the control of your local server's operator.

That is literally what it is for. That is not a bug; it is not just a feature; it is the whole design.

The ability of servers to go their own way is why it's a federated service and not a centralized one.

When you send an email from you@aol.com to them@ox.ac.uk, you cannot take it back. The content of your email is sent from your computer, to AOL's server, to Oxford's server, to the recipient's email client on their computer. Oxford can back it up as part of regular server backups. The recipient can print it out on their printer and put it in a filing cabinet and show it to someone ten years later. For that matter, AOL is under American jurisdiction and Oxford is under British jurisdiction.

That's literally what SMTP email is for. It's for sending a message to someone else in a different zone of control. As a result, you can't take it back.

Same goes here. ActivityPub is a lot like email, Usenet, and other classic federated protocols; a major difference is that it's implemented on top of HTTPS and JSON rather than raw TCP and line-based classic-IETF-style protocols.

(BTW, LaRouchies have always been racist neofascist cultists. The poster of the rant we're responding to is wacky, but he's not wrong about that.)

As someone who deleted an account on one server to create an account on another, I can say that my comment remained but my username did NOT. I'm not particularly opposed to the comments remaining for the sake of thread continuity.

Personally, I'd like a 2FA option, but the post on Raddle about privacy does not ring true to me. I can't speak to the admin side of things, however.

What does post/comment permanency have to do with privacy? The linked post is an opinion, with no facts backing up their extreme claims.

It's true that if you delete a comment, your username remains, but is that a matter of privacy? Was it acceptably private before deletion? Why does that change afterwards?

I'm extremely skeptical of the poster sharing partial truths with opinion and no sources.

Edit: I read some of the comments. Poor jorgesumle4, yeesh!

This sort of thing has been talked about many times before. Everything you do publicly (post, comment, and even vote) on lemmy is federated to every instance where a user has subscribed to where the community is hosted, meaning possibly thousands of servers. Once federation happens you have no control over it. You can "delete" it, but that just sends a federated message to those same servers saying "this user wanted to delete that post". There is no guarantee they honor that request or mechanism to force compliance. Servers could even pretend to delete it, but just hide it and keep a copy forever if they wanted.

The internet is forever, especially in the fediverse. If you post anywhere on the internet someone can make an archive link that shows the post, your username, and any media forever.

Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible

This makes a lot of sense to keep a copy of what was deleted in case it is needed for all manner of things such as reporting to police or validating a pattern of a user's bad behavior even if they are deleting their messages.

The username thing is potentially a problem, but I think is just part of the federation protocol. The protocol has to identify who is doing the delete (so not just anybody can delete anyone else's comment), and that delete message basically takes the place of the deteled content. There may be a better way of handling that specifically in lemmy or the UI, but there is no guarantee other servers will behave the same, that is information that is out there.

Deleted account usernames remain visible too

Basically the same as above.

Anything remains visible on federated servers!

By design.

When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server

Not sure about this, there are layers of caching involved and those do get auto purged by default after a maximum of 6 months or something. This is a pretty common thing where if someone posts something to social media you can find a CDN link that will keep working for e.g. a photo even if the post holding the photo is deleted. It could probably be improved by servers finding and purging that item from their cache when they get a delete message.

the operator and developer of lemmy has very problematic politics

This whole section is basically fear-mongering. Lemmy is just one implementation of a federating server and these "problems" have basically always existed. Yes, the developer of Lemmy is a communist. If that causes mistrust don't use lemmy.ml (the only server the dev runs AFAIK). If you don't trust the software written by a communist for some reason, then use Kbin (if you want a reddit-like view of the fediverse) or Mastodon/Pleroma/Akkoma/Misskey/GNU Social/PeerTube/Pixelfed/Friendica/etc (various twitter/facebook/youtube/instagram styled fediverse softwares).

"Wants to post on a social media website" "Wants pure privacy on the social media website"

I'm not sure what the issue is here... Did you know that your ISP has a record of every website you've ever been to on a server you don't control and they can look at it whenever they want?

Did you know you leave a record of your device on any network you join, leaving a unique ID behind that can be mapped back to you? This record is stored on severs you don't control and the operatora can view this record whenever they want?

Did you know that the admins of raddle have access to all your comments and DMs?! And they can read them at any time?!

All I see here is an apparent admin of the site making a bunch of bad faith arguments and threatening to ban people who disagree with them.

Glad to see raddle is still a cesspool of purity-testing and knee-jerk takes… =w="

I used to really like it, too. I was active and supportive for a couple years (even back when it was raddit!), but wow this reminds me about why I don't miss it. I’m already liking Lemmy so much more, and I’ve only been here a couple weeks!

Here is a link to another discussion on this topic.

ActivityPub has deletion protocols that at worst need to be implemented. Overall any shortcoming in the Lemmy code base can be fixed, and as always nothing is truly private on the public internet. It's like expecting privacy using the sidewalk or the public park. We should try to have instances respect deletion requests though, but all that can be done is to ask servers nicely through an API.

My issue with this is that it feels like kinda an issue with federated software