Kinda weird and sus that some Mastodon instances aren’t respecting deletes…

Had a post I deleted last week that just got replied to, from a mastodon instance.

And people wonder why casual users don’t wanna be here…🤦‍♂️

#Mastodon #Fedi #Fediverse

  • Tom Casavant@tomkahe.com
    3·
    3 months ago

    @ThaMunsta@nervesocket.com @BeAware@social.beaware.live actually now that you mention it, I’m not sure how Mastodon decides where to send Deletes to

    Like, does it maintain a list of all servers that requested your post? That feels excessive but also probably the only way to ensure that every server that has your data deletes it. Or does it just send it to all your followers and servers that boosted/liked it

    • BeAware :fediverse:@social.beaware.liveOP
      2·
      3 months ago

      @tom@tomkahe.com @ThaMunsta@nervesocket.com it should send delete requests to every instance that it was sent to. It should know that because my server has to actually send the post. Maybe I’m misunderstanding things but this seems like it should be an easy thing to do.

      • Tom Casavant@tomkahe.com
        1·
        3 months ago

        @BeAware@social.beaware.live @ThaMunsta@nervesocket.com From glancing through the github issues it looks like it only does that for account deletions. Though I have no idea how many of these are resolved or no longer function as described in the issues

        https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/22273:

        One outstanding issue with Mastodon is that deleting a local account sends a Delete activity to the whole known fediverse to ensure everyone is aware that the account does not exist anymore. This is wasteful, and increasingly so with the growth of the fediverse. It is also a minor privacy concern, as servers who would otherwise not know about an account would learn about its (previous) existence without a good reason.

        https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22154

        Currently, posts deleted over a week earlier on one server are still visible on others. For example, I can see (on both mastodon.social and mstdn.social) a post I deleted at the start of December on mstdn.jp. On both of those other servers, it looks like the post is still live and available on mstdn.jp.

        https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22070#issuecomment-1340711206:

        To clear up some misunderstanding, Mastodon does not send a Delete to every known server for every deleted post, that would be too expensive. It does send a Delete to every known server for every deleted account though.
        I do have some idea on how to improve that (keep track of which servers ever requested an account, using a bloom filter so it remains manageable storage-wise), but it will require some work and will only work for newly-created accounts, not ones that existed before the change was implemented.

        https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/6849#issuecomment-1418688876

        It’s retried a bunch of times, but once every retry is elapsed and the post is deleted, Mastodon stores neither the post’s previous existence nor who was supposed to see it, so such a feature would require the admin to provide:
        the post’s author
        the post’s exact ID
        who to send the deletion notice to