First of all I am super happy that such alternative exists but it’s far from perfect due to many reasons and this is why I think it’s not ready yet to absorb the influx of reddit users because many of them will just bounce off when they realize it.
My biggest gripes so far:
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Users are unable to block whole instances hence you either need to register with instance that already blocks unwanted instances (which is not perfect because it might block also those that you don’t want to be blocked) or you need to block manually every single community there or you will be exposed to lemmygrad or other tankie instances. That’s so basic feature I can’t find any logical reasons that was not a thing since day 1.
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Lemmy is one of the least privacy friendly (unless you just use throwaways and disposable mail like you should) service I have ever stumbled upon and while it’s partially due to how federation works it’s just a fact that even reddit did that better because it was way easier to nuke your account and all traces (including nicknames in deleted comments, which is not a case on lemmy).
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There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance (which somehow is possible on Mastodon), so you basically have to trust that your instance won’t disappear overnight. Obviously any site can disappear, centralized or not but there are bigger chances that some random Joe will decide to close instance without saying anything than reddit closing down overnight without letting you copy your stuff. That’s even more annyoing if you consider that instance admin can restrict you from viewing instances they don’t like, hence you would need to create account on another instance and resubscribe to anything manually which is far from perfect.
What are your views on that for the time being?
I never thought of the right to be forgotten aspart of the right to privacy. They always seemed separate.
But technically federating a deletion shouldn’t be more complicated than federating an addition. It would make sense to have the option when deleting an account to nuke all posts as well. It might not be perfect if an instance is defederated in between, but it should be pretty good.
Of the elder federated services, Usenet supports “cancel” and “supersede” messages, intended to allow a user to retract a post. But the authentication was crap in the '90s, leading to a problem with forged cancel messages, which were readily abused by bad folks. So news server admins had to figure out under what conditions to process a cancel.
Also, instances can go offline and come back later. I haven’t read the code yet, but I’d be surprised if rejoining the federation reliably backfills all the deletions that have ever happened.