This might have to do with downtime on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml which prevented them from getting the request to delete the comment.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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If that's so, these instances (and who knows which other ones in the world) now host OPs and comments that I as an author decided to delete.
How does one delete information from the fediverse? If this is true, you cannot. Your data will be hosted forever, at least somewhere.
If people use their personal name for an account, this might result in a significant GDPR problem for all instances.
Yes, posts can remain on some rogue servers forever.
Up until recently, deleted posts were stored in all server’s databases forever, just with a deleted flag next to them. It was recently changed to purge after 30 days. Even so, someone could setup a server that ignores all deletes and will still retain them forever.
For privacy, editing your post first may be useful as that seems to propagate faster. This could still suffer from the same rogue server issue not respecting edits.
This is a problem that doesn’t seem to have an answer yet.
Worth noting that it's not a lemmy specific issue. There's Reddit databases out there with full edit and delete history.
If it's publicly visible at any point, one should assume it's on the Internet forever.
Yes, that is a known problem with the Fediverse model, and we probably would be seeing court cases in the future. There is no way to compel everybody to delete the data on their servers.