If at some point you want to delete your account and have your posts and comments be gone, you better delete it all manually before you actually delete the account, because that deletion process does not really work as advertised.
For my main account on world (which runs an outdated lemmy version), it seemed like at least the account deletion was federated so that my user page was no longer browsable from other instances, but none of my posts, comments or images had been deleted, not even on the home instance.
The homie @MrKaplan@lemmy.world helped me by manually deleting my stuff, but it seems like that has only worked for the home instance, posts and comments seem to still be readable from other instances (except for some of the images that MrKaplan manually deleted too, but that was only possible up to a date not too far in the past because lemmy used to not associate user uploads with the accounts). So my old posts from the world account can be viewed just fine from other instances:
For other instances that are more up to date the process is even worse imo, while locally things seem to get deleted, federation does not seem to happen at all. For example you can still browse my deleted slrpnk or lemmee accounts from other instances just fine:
https://slrpnk.net/u/achtungdrempels@lemm.ee
https://lemm.ee/u/AchtungDrempels@slrpnk.net
Account deletion in piefed works kinda like the old lemmy system (as on lemmy.world), and nothing gets deleted except the user page (which also seems to get federated), the posts and comments stay up.
Thought this would be interesting to some, if i had known what a mess this would be (obviously expected some federation issues, just not like that), i would have manually deleted everything. I deleted all these accounts in December, maybe this has been addressed somehow in the meantime, personally i’d have trust issues in this process.
I want erasure of my content to be full erasure. If I delete an account unless state otherwise, I want its content to be wipe out. I want the comment I delete to be fully delete not just the word replace. If I deleted it there should not be in a database the time, date of a comment and my name associates to a “deleted by user” comment. There should be no comment at all and no possibility to store information related to what should not exist at all.
Fair enough. I guess we can skip the other options then, at least for your case. The replacement isn’t implemented in a very thoughtful way, I agree. For technical reasons, you can’t have it your way either. A platform with tree-style comments or replies can’t have a comment in-between deleted entirely, or the rest of the tree will collapse. So there needs to be some empty placeholder. Or you just can’t use platforms which allow users to reply to each other, but that’s more a you-problem. I agree though, if you delete it, it can’t have your username or content left behind. Thanks for raising this concern. I’m not sure if anyone ever put it on the agenda for Lemmy.