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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

All of these are a problem with Reddit today.

everything on Reddit gets archived near instantly. I don’t think expecting deletion to work on public forums online is reasonable.

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Agreed. Though the political opinions of the core owner (?) might be problematic for project growth.

For federated APIs though i tend not to think Privacy exists. "Delete me" is nice, but when it's already broadcasted to dozens of other instances it feels a bit moot. Still, worth doing right if you're going to do it at all - not sure why an instance owner would want to host everything indefinitely anyway. Storage concerns and all.

This whole conversation is making me want to take the plunge and check out ActivityPub. "It can't be that hard" lol, right?

Queue the narrator: "It was that hard".

The thing is that if they want to operate in the EU then this will have to be solved. The right to be forgotten exists, and saying "it's federated lol" is not an excuse.

Sidenote, i wonder if EU requires you keep some information about a user. Ie hypothetically, given some arbitrary P2P setup, you might need to record users that need to be forgotten, any aliases they fall under, etc. Lest you risk publishing said "forgotten" content from another source that is broadcasting.

Worse yet if this publication is in a slightly tweaked format that your software doesn't recognize.

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