Deleting or overwriting the title and content on ml seems to propagate sometimes, but not always.
Don't hit, I really like the idea of the Fediverse and Lemmy in particular--I guess I already sort of knew that things worked this way, but, well, I'd be lying if I didn't say this spooked me a bit.
EDIT: I'm usually pretty good about not rageposting or whatever, so there's not a whole lot of stuff I want to expunge from the record, but there are some tech support type questions that I've asked in the past that now seem to me unbelievably and embarrassingly dumb that I'm not sure I want to have out there!
~~EDIT EDIT: I'd also be lying if I didn't say my eyes were wandering a bit towards raddle.me at this point...~~
EDIT EDIT EDIT: (sorry, feeling kinda punchy over here after too much early-morning โ๏ธ) This reminds me of something from back in the pre-Snowden days, when everything was still mostly htttp and while websurfing I had Wireshark open and saw "http://www.nytimes.com/lifestyle/how-to-get-the-most-enjoyment-from-watching-clown-porn.html" flashing past.
Seriously tho, this is back when I, along with just about everyone else I knew, would say things like "well, yeah, you know, Google, Facebook, the internet, etc., everything's out there in the open, but what can you do?" And then there's the feeling you get when you actually see identifiable stuff like this going out across the wires and you're like "...oh..." ๐
Not unlike the time when my boss asked me if I liked to listen to Rush:
Me: I haven't really listened to that much of their stuff, although I really like Power Windows.
My boss: No, I meant Rush Limbaugh.
Me: ...oh... ๐
That's the downside, if you want to call it that, of one entity not having control of everything. If there's something you want removed, you have to talk with everyone to remove it.
However, in conventional social media what's to stop anyone from archiving it, taking screenshot, an AI scraping it while it's available or just someone remembering it? Reddit etc. can hide/obfuscate stuff but you can presume it's not really gone.
So as I've said in similar threads, in terms of failure modes, Lemmy leans towards preventing censorship over trying to be private or have full control over content. "Perfect" privacy/ability to remove would require an invasive level of access to other people's servers and devices that wouldn't be appropriate.