Some time ago there was dismay on Mastodon (and Pleroma ?) instances about data scraping. Before that happened there were privacy concerned people automatically deleting their own toots, limiting them for example to the latest toots for thirty days. With Lemmy things are different since Lemmy is a link aggregator rather than micro blogging, and Mastodon has boost option (Called replay with Pleroma ?). However deleting your older comments (but not posts) automatically would be really nice for privacy reasons.
It seems to me that when you put something on a public part of the internet that you should assume it will be archived automatically by any number of crawlers. Innocuous things like the wayback machine on archive.org, but also any number of corporations or governments could do for whatever they see as in their interests. I feel that deleting or autodeleting leads to a false sense of security, in fact it might draw more attention if something disappears.
Several people on Mastodon delete their old toots. Here a blog post from a well-known person on Mastodon with their reasons : https://kevq.uk/why-i-delete-old-content/
excerpt : I also wouldn’t want something I’ve said years ago be taken out of context (or taken correctly, but I’ve changed my opinion since). So it’s easier to delete my shizzle.
I think the more productive thing to do would be for people to learn that people can change.
How common, or how real is it that something someone has said in the past, would be not merely a poorer, if clumsier articulation of their present, but instead a fundamentally different nature, to the point of being decisively opositional altogether?
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To learn is to change. If you haven’t changed any of your opinions over the course of your life, then you haven’t learned anything.
That’s why most people can recall at least a couple extremely stupid things they did while they were younger that they would absolutely not do today.
This is something I don’t like because I often forgot things about people I know and need to refresh my memory.
It is also my way to understand other people.
If you put something in public, unless it was an error (which should be deleted in a little period of time) I think that should be still there.
It might be “easier” but is it the right thing to do? Also, as others have said, likely there is a copy of it somewhere anyways, so why bother deleting it?
You keep pushing your own agenda in this conversation without looking at my privacy concerns, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. More than before I feel like deleting my account here.
agreed, when we share something publicly that can be accessed by anyone there’s not much room for privacy. the best one could ask is having some anonimity so no no one can link the posts to your real identity.