Lemmy is a service for the purpose of publishing your posts & comments to servers that are outside of your control or the control of your local server's operator.

That is literally what it is for. That is not a bug; it is not just a feature; it is the whole design.

The ability of servers to go their own way is why it's a federated service and not a centralized one.

When you send an email from you@aol.com to them@ox.ac.uk, you cannot take it back. The content of your email is sent from your computer, to AOL's server, to Oxford's server, to the recipient's email client on their computer. Oxford can back it up as part of regular server backups. The recipient can print it out on their printer and put it in a filing cabinet and show it to someone ten years later. For that matter, AOL is under American jurisdiction and Oxford is under British jurisdiction.

That's literally what SMTP email is for. It's for sending a message to someone else in a different zone of control. As a result, you can't take it back.

Same goes here. ActivityPub is a lot like email, Usenet, and other classic federated protocols; a major difference is that it's implemented on top of HTTPS and JSON rather than raw TCP and line-based classic-IETF-style protocols.

(BTW, LaRouchies have always been racist neofascist cultists. The poster of the rant we're responding to is wacky, but he's not wrong about that.)

What does post/comment permanency have to do with privacy? The linked post is an opinion, with no facts backing up their extreme claims.

It's true that if you delete a comment, your username remains, but is that a matter of privacy? Was it acceptably private before deletion? Why does that change afterwards?

I'm extremely skeptical of the poster sharing partial truths with opinion and no sources.

Edit: I read some of the comments. Poor jorgesumle4, yeesh!

Edit2: and won't be going anywhere near raddle, either. Oof! "My echo chamber isn't echoing right! I must now yell and spew some ad hominem hate! Ahh, much better."

Edit3: To @orientalsniper@lemmy.world, I would say your OP question, "is there truth to this?" is being asked about an opinion. Can opinion be true or false? I don't really understand the premise. If you're posting on the public internet, that's not private. Full stop. Any platform on the public internet, no matter how you can or cannot delete your contributions, is not private.

My issue with this is that it feels like kinda an issue with federated software