Fediverse

That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation, especially considering Lemmy is developed in and funded in part by the EU, and the "staying online forever" thing is a consequence of Federation (and one they're working on remedying).

If you were worried about this sort of thing, perhaps you should have done your research about the platform before making an account so you could bitch about it here. You definitely don't sound like the voice of reason when you couldn't be arsed to figure this out before you made an account.

It's been a problem for a while. Considering major social media companies have already gotten massive fines from the EU for violating the GDPR, maybe the lemmy devs will put more effort in setting up a deletion system once the EU sends them a fine for breaking the law?

Oh no, that's not even the half of it. The admin for your instance has access to literally anything on their server, including passwords afaik. If you want privacy, this ain't it chief.

Well it is pretty much impossible to delete anything on any federated service. It is technically just not possible without opening a whole other world of problems.

I always like to think of the fediverse in some way like emails. If you send an email, the moment it leaves your mail providers server it is pretty much impossible to stop.

Basically think before you post. The internet never forgets, the fediverse especially so.

To my knowledge, these privacy laws prevent corporations from holding onto your data after you have requested to delete it. Lemmy is not a corporation, and there is no single entity that holds onto all of your data. That's just a tradeoff of being decentralized.

I don't know where this myth came from, but you don't have a right to erase your public posts from there internet under GDPR. See, for example, https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/32361/does-a-user-have-the-right-to-request-their-forum-posts-deleted

If anything, you might have such rights under copyright law, if your posts cover the threshold for copyright. In that case, you can ask server admins to delete them, and they will have to comply. But the request has to reach them (if they're defederated, the delete button won't teach them, and you'll have to contact them separately).