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Hey, #Mastodon usage/behavior question I don't quite know where to direct.
Scenario:
I was just having a conversation with someone earlier today, and I had a notification come in while I was at work that they had replied to me. I didn't have time right then to deal with it, but when I got off work, I went to my notifications (on the web interface) and found it. In preparation for replying, I went to review the original conversation and discovered that their comment to me, to which I was trying to reply, was gone.
I had thought they had maybe been moderated, or deleted their comment, but it turned out their *entire account* was deleted.
But their comment was still in my notifications.
So, questions:
When somebody deletes their Mastodon account, what residual traces of their toots are still out there in the system somewhere? Like this deleted toot in my notifications?
Will this notification I have be purged eventually or do I get to keep it indefinitely?
And...
Moderation: It's possible that someone reported my interlocutor for being out of line (which, legitimately they were) and a moderator stepped in... But which moderators? A moderator of their instance, a moderator of my instance, a moderator of a third party's instance? Who has "jurisdiction" here, to stop a conversation I am having with someone by deleting their comments?
Presumably, since their whole account is gone, their previous comment to me, to which I had already replied, is also gone - thus orphaning my reply toots. Where are my thus orphaned reply toots visible? To whom are they discoverable? Is there some sense in which my interlocutor being silenced mean I wind up being silenced too?
@siderea I have encountered this scenario as well. And I’ve found really inconsistent cacheing behavior across the web interface, 3rd party apps, and my web browser. Occasionally, I’m able to see deleted posts for hours to days after being removed.
Your replies are still visible on your account. I checked for the thread you’re referencing and, on Ivory, the posts are still threaded but without the other persons posts for context. I’ve had this happen and it really bothers me.
@siderea As far as jurisdiction goes. The other person’s posts can be deleted by the admin/mods of their server. Your admin/mods can block the person (or their whole server) which would also cut off the thread. As far as I know, a third party has no control over what is posted or deleted on another server.
Yes, a conversation you’re having could be made contextless by a deleted profile, deleted posts, or blocking the other user or their instances. Admins have control over all these behaviors.
@siderea I’ve taken to screenshooting posts that I could see being deleted. That way the conversation could be reconstructed.
The whole set up is frustrating. I’ve had some very good points about racism orphaned by white men deleting their posts. I can only assume they were ashamed of their ignorance.
@aimless Right?! Sometimes they're not even arguments. Sometimes I've had a beautiful conversation with someone and then they have an argument with *someone else*, or otherwise get in trouble, and lo, *my* words get orphaned.
@siderea I thought of another scenario where this can happen that’s less moderation based. Users and admins can have posts auto delete after a set period of time. And that leaves the scroll back in the same contextless state.
Indexing/scraping/copying a users post onto another server/website/platform has been met with firm pushback by a lot of admins. So I don’t know how continuity can be maintained while also respecting the culture here.
There is a certain subculture within the social justice communities that normalizes deletion of things one regrets having said. I have no idea whether this is relevant in the cases you're referring to, but it's definitely a thing. I've even seen accounts that say things upfront like "please let me know if I ever say anything problematic and I'll edit or delete to fix it."
@athorn I understand the impulse, especially because people will dig up old posts for malicious reasons. I’d prefer a person edit their post with a correction and apology. But editing is pretty new for former Twitter users. Old habits die hard?
I think there are two separate things: on the one hand, people are afraid of their problematic words coming back to haunt them. That's more about self-preservation than social justice. On the other hand, there are also people who seem to strongly believe that editing and removing problematic content is the *socially responsible* thing to do. Some of that might be thoughts for the future, but I think the usual justification is about impact on marginalized people in the present.
P.S. Editing is pretty new for seasoned Mastodon users too! ; )
@athorn I’m in the camp off leave it up but add something that explains why it’s an issue. Otherwise less informed people will just be “wut?”
But we all have different levels of capacity and number of characters so I get it. I will still grumble when my posts are left to float in a void.
I'm the same way.
But I've definitely seen people come down hard the other way. Actually got into an argument with someone about it a while back and (perhaps ironically) it appears that they later blocked me, leaving my comments floating. Oh well.
@siderea when someone deletes a toot, it takes sometime to propagate to other servers. If the account is deleted and the account toots purged, they should be deleted shortly after. If there is some kind of disconnection between servers (like some offline/down period) it can take even days until the server retries and complete the tasks.
@santiago Thanks! So if a server goes down - this was one user on a large server, but we could imagine one person on a one-person server who also rage-deletes their instance - the residual toots might never be deleted?
@siderea servers retry a given number of times and eventually they give up and mark the task as a dead job. sysadmins often purge dead jobs and dead accounts as well. When a dead remote account is found dead, the server purge local cache info of it, so, it eventually get erased completely.
Oh, hmm! So when mastodon.lol and mastodon.au are shut down, all the comments that have been transmitted by federation will also be deleted? Is this also true of people who migrate to off those to other servers? Are their comments re-attributed to their new accounts or orphaned and purged?