Sync for Lemmy @lemmy.world kamenLady. @lemmy.world 7 mo. ago

Deleting a Comment

I'm pretty confused about one thing.

When deleting your own comment, there always stays a placeholder in its place. I noticed this with my own and other lemmings posts.

So far so good, but i tried to reply to a deleted comment by another lemming and above the reply box was the full comment the other user deleted.

I mean the full content of the comment that was deleted.

Is this the normal behavior in Lemmy or is it Sync?

I mean, i want my deleted comments to disappear and not just hidden and for everyone available to read.

Please try it out and reply to my deleted comment in this post. Just above the reply textarea you'll see my deleted comment.

17 comments

Lemmy let's you un-delete anything you've deleted, so nothing really gets nuked (it seems to be the way these things work anyway, that it's just a 'deleted' flag that's flipped between true and false).

On the one hand, it's a Lemmy problem - I can see you're comment using the API:

curl --request GET \ --url 'https://lemmy.world/api/v3/comment?id=8986376' \ --header 'accept: application/json' => { "comment_view": { "comment": { "id": 8986376, "creator_id": 399371, "post_id": 13748490, "content": "See what i mean? I deleted this!", "removed": false, "published": "2024-03-31T09:48:22.897008Z", "deleted": true, "ap_id": "https://lemmy.world/comment/8986376", "local": true, "path": "0.8986376", "distinguished": false, "language_id": 37 ...

But there's also a bug with Sync in that it's not checking the flag if someone try to reply.
- This seems like a massive problem. I should have the right to completely remove content I post.
  
  If it's something you feel strongly about, then for this reason, and the usual federation reasons, it's probably better to overwrite your content with "[deleted]" or something, rather than delete it.
  
  fwiw, every week or so there is a scheduled task that permanently overwrites contents of deleted comments.
  
  fyi @freamon@lemmy.world
- What's the difference between removed and deleted in the response?
  
  Removed by Mod vs. Deleted by User
  
  (you may have already seen this - my original reply went to the wrong place. Which is another Sync bug incidentally, when using the notification to reply (Android))
Due to the nature of Lemmy, nothing is ever truly deleted as it gets federated across multiple different instances.

It may eventually sync across most.

Deleting tends to only delete it on that instance, hence why when you reply to a deleted one, chances are you see it from your current instance's cache. Or vice versa.
- This makes sense, i wasn't aware of the extended effects of federation.
Removed by Mod vs. Deleted by User (sorry, this reply is in the wrong place)
See what i mean? I deleted this!
- I can't believe you said this!!!!
  
  But seriously this means comments aren't truly being deleted
  
  I came across some that had:
  
  [This comment was deleted by an automated system]
  
  But that was like 1 in 10 deleted comments i checked.
- yeah the last few weeks whenever we delete something, it will still show our username in perpetuity, but to make my actual comment go away I manually delete the comment And replace it with a hashtag.
  
  Thereafter, people can still upvote the nothingness comment or downvote the nothingness comment and they can still reply to the nothingness comment If they're weird and they want to, and sometimes they are weird and they do.
- Your comment show up as deleted for me. Deletions take a while to sync across instances, like anything else in the fediverse.
- See what i mean? I deleted this!
  
  Yeah I can see it on Sync, through lemmy.ml home instance.

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