I’m starting to get annoyed with Lemmy. None of the posts I delete seem to disappear from the internet. My profile still shows up in other communities, and everything I delete—posts and comments—still seems visible to people. It’s really annoying. Sometimes I want something to disappear for good, but it’s still there for people to read or see. Am I the only one who thought I’d actually deleted it? -_-
Honestly, why are you deleting so many posts? It’s incredibly annoying when I reply to a post only to find that it was deleted. If you don’t want people seeing something, don’t post it.
I love using this.
When you post something to lemmy it gets sent out to every federated instance. When you delete something, it sends a deletion request to all federated instances. Other instances can process this request slowly (or not at all) so you end up with posts/comments that look deleted to you but still show up on other instances.
So pretty much once it’s out there it’s out there.
or, to quote most of our mothers…
“once you put something out on the internet, there’s no deleting it. it’s there forever.”
You will loose your mind when you learn about the internet archive…
Everything you post on the public internet may still there somewhere, it’s not just the feature of lemmy, its how the internet works. Your deleted reddit comments are also archived in a lot of places.
The lemmy specific part is the instances copy all posts and comments to their servers, federation is slow, so there may be some delays. But servers can just ignore your deletion requests
You saying that makes me want to give up using my phone. I remember that before I got banned from Reddit, I shared some photos of myself online. Now I realize how stupid that was, and I feel like disappearing from the world right now :/
I did too. Photos of my first kid. We were all lulled into a false sense of security
Don’t share online what you wouldn’t be comfortable being public. It’s inevitable that your picture and your real name are discoverable publically. Sure you can choose to never do it, but what about someone in your personal network who uploads a photo of taco Tuesday with you in it, and someone makes a comment about how happy you look with a belly full of carne asada.
Best you can do is avoid sharing your opinions under anything but an alias. We knew this back in the olden days (the 90s and before), but as the internet got more convenient and widespread we all chose to ignore that. Real names, photos, “stories” about what we did that day.
One of the biggest reason for anonymity. Never use your real name on the internet unless its VERY curated. You never know what weirdos will do.
Lessons from the first days of the internet there.
Just be careful from now on, you cant do much about what already out there. If you just stop updating info about yourself it will become outdated rather quickly.
Since everyone else has already answered your main question, it’s also worth pointing out that all of your upvotes and downvotes are mostly public due to the nature of the Fediverse and needing to publish that info.
There are ways to mitigate that, such as using PieFed and setting your votes to only count locally, or to only federate to “trusted” instances. Otherwise, another way to handle it is to use a “voting only” account and don’t make any comments with it.
Not sure if you know the answer to this, but since your comment reminded me of it I’m going to ask you, random Lemmy stranger.
Sometimes while scrolling through Lemmy on my phone I will accidentally click downvote on a post or comment. I usually immediately notice and clear my downvote out.
Would that downvote stay in my public voting history and could it populate across instances?
TL/DR: Archival instances might, but most (even Lemvotes) won’t hold onto that.
Anything you post or do is shared out to a much wider audience. You might be using a Lemmy account, but interactions are shared with Twitter-like instances (Mastodon) as much as they are shared with other Reddit-like (Threadiverse) instances such as PieFed or Mbin, as well as other kinds of instances that interact with the Fediverse.
Even Meta has a presence here on the Fediverse with Threads. You just don’t see a lot of Threads users toggling their account over to interact with the rest of the Fediverse, but there are a few who do. Granted, upvotes and downvotes aren’t displayed for most Twitter-like instances. So, I would say it’s unlikely that they are recording that.
If you accidentally downvote a post or a comment that information will be sent out to every other instance which is connected (federated) with yours. As I mentioned before, you could set up an account to limit how votes are shared which would mitigate that. Some instances might even have a feature to delay voting for a very short time to allow for cancellations.
So, would it stay in your public voting history? For any other instances that are set up for archiving and registering the history of the Fediverse, yes. But in almost every other case, no. Most fediverse instances will honor when you have cancelled an upvote or a downvote.
Great explanation, thank you!
Anything you post on the internet is public and near immediately scooped up by automated bots. Now that we have LLMs, I am convinced that there are automated workflows that put together profiles of anonymous posters. Don’t post things publicly that you want to stay private. Deleting things is not undoing posting them. None of this is specifically about Lemmy- it’s about the internet.
Now about lemmy: when you post, the server where you post (called instance) sends it to dozens of other instances, so the users of all those servers can see it. So you are not posting only to your instance, you are posting to a whole network of instances, called the “fediverse”. The point of this is, when your instance stops working, all the posts on it still survive on the federated instances. When you delete something, your instance flags it deleted, and replaces the content with a placeholder like “deleted by user”. All the other instances may follow this, or may not, intentionally or due to technical reasons. In conclusion: treat lemmy as super public.
Removals and deletions can take time to federate out, and sometimes there are errors.
If you reach out to admins of large instances, they can manually remove your stuff. Please feel free to send me a DM, and I’ll see what I can do from our end (lemmy.ca, piefed.ca).
If it helps, your content won’t keep federating out indefinitely. Let’s say your instance (lemmy.world) is A, ours is B, and some random one is C. Here is a timeline
- your post on A -> nothing on B, nothing on C
- your post on A -> your post on B, nothing on C
- deleted on A -X your post on B, nothing on C
At this point, if C comes online and tries to get your post, it can’t get it. Even though B has a copy, C can’t get it since A doesn’t have it anymore.
So once you get it deleted from B as well, it’s gone.
If it’s really important, someone could make a script to track down every remaining post and keep track of it while they’re taken down. Unfortunately this is an area that the fediverse is weaker at, for the time being
(Internet archives aside anyway)
https://www.poster.ly/guides/lemmy-guide
Lemmy is the federated answer to Reddit: link aggregation, threaded comments, and up/down voting, but spread across hundreds of independently operated servers instead of one company. It is also small. Roughly 48,600 monthly active users across about 455 instances as of December 2025, against Reddit’s 100 million plus daily actives.1 That is approximately one one-thousandth of Reddit’s scale, and this guide will not pretend otherwise.
Depending on the instance owner or software, federation may be slow or never.
I guess I really was kind of stupid. I forgot to read Lemmy’s privacy policy, and, well, things never really disappear from the internet. Anyway, there’s nothing I can do about it now. A bunch of my comments and other stuff might still be out there, saved by some Lemmy community.
Not stupid, just green, and I can all but guarantee a few thousand others also didn’t know. Now you do, use it as a data point for future reference, and don’t worry too much about it, going forward. 🤗🤍
FWIW, you can try editing a comment instead of deleting it, so any instance that federates but doesn’t respect deletions will maybe at least push the edit.
Funny you say that. I’m looking at building a Lemmy instance that acts as a “ledger” like Reddit had by modding the code to ignore edit and delete requests. Any posts it gets via ActivityPub will be permanently archived.
I’m probably not the first to do that either as I’m fairly certain AI companies that aren’t scraping have built out instances that give all our posts to their models in nice, easy to digest, JSON format.
If you leave it accessible online, that’s a good way to get into legal trouble. Sometimes mods/admins delete things because it’s illegal content. Even the Reddit ones avoid doing that
Illegal where? There aren’t any laws with universal jurisdiction.
Of course you go for the worst of the worst, and yes there would have to be some policing involved for illegal comments but that’s not an insurmountable task. Reddit had an undelete site that operated for years just fine. The wayback machine also exists. All of that is fair use. So stop with the doom and gloom.
That was my main concern, and so I mentioned it. I didn’t tell you not to do it
¯\_(ツ)_/¯I’m familiar with Reddit’s version and I find it useful
Fair enough. Most people just try to mask their disdain for something with a series of “well it won’t work because….” rather than just flat out saying they don’t like it and why.
Misinterpretation on my part.
I’d love a way to know about it if/when you make this. I added a feature to my Lemmy instance that repopulates removed content straight from the modlog, but that only gets you so much and isn’t super reliable, so having a source like what you’re describing would be a huge upgrade
Piefed retains a copy of the thread if someone has a direct link to it. 👀
As for comments, the original unedited one still stays in one’s notification.
I think if you subscribe (enable notifications) to a comm/thread/comment, the posts in the comm / replies to the thread / replies to the specific comment, will always show up in the notifications on piefed until it gets dismissed. I mean I can see the original comment in notifications even though when I click on it, it says “edited X hours ago”, same with deleted comments.
So yea if someone doesnt mind a bunch of notifications, it is one method to rerain a record of everything you say in a comm/thread/under a particular comment.
I personally suspect the reason is due to a bug or a limitation in the system.
When we delete a post, our home instance sends a message to all federated instances: “User X has deleted their post. Please do the same on your end.”
But once that activity is sent, the home instance can’t enforce that every other instance actually deletes it. If a remote instance is offline or misses the delivery, the deletion may not propagate there immediately, or at all.
I’ve seen some people mention that this was an intended feature. Yes, it could be. But only for specific instances where the owner modified its code to ignore delete requests. But if this happened in any of the mainstream and more popular instances (which I’m assuming is the case for you), then it’s definitely a bug or limitation.
