I’ve been using federated social media for a while now and I recently considered setting up an instance for my local community as a sort of Facebook alternative. However, as I thought about it, I wondered if ActivityPub’s deletion problem (i.e. if a user deletes their content on their server it doesn’t guarantee the content being deleted on other servers) is a fatal flaw. I worry that it would be difficult to secure buy-in from people if they were made aware of this issue, which they have the right to. It does make me wonder if the ATProtocol will be the better protocol if and when it becomes open source.
I’m curious as to other drivers users’ thoughts. While it is an issue that we may be happy to live with given the numerous other benefits ActivityPub provides, is it a flaw that will ultimately prevent wide scale adoption?
This “fatal” flaw is hardly unique to ActivityPub. You fundamentally cannot control anything you publish on the internet. You can’t stop people from saving copies or taking screenshots, you can’t stop archive bots or LLM web scrapers, and you can’t force Lemmy instances to honor deletion requests.
Even on Reddit there’s been undeleters and archives since basically forever.
Even for regular websites, there’s always the Internet Archive.
It’s hardly a new problem: you always assumed the Internet was forever.