If I delete my post, I want it deleted, WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?
So why, when I delete a post, I see “undelete”? Who was the genius who thought of this idea as being a good one?
Thanks.
It’s technically impossible to ensure a complete deletion in a distributed system like the fediverse (which Lemmy is based on). When you post something it’s sent to many different servers, which could ignore your delete request afterwards. Also, the users who received it could have read it already, and we don’t have the technology to make them forget (yet).
Could just be like “overwrite data” and what it does is automatically edit and overwrite the post to just say “deleted”?
We have the technology. We can fix them.
So just remove the delete feature entirely then.
Because mistakes happen.
I know mistakes happen, it’s just not the right way of handling it. “Delete” is misleading.
I could almost see your point, except that “don’t show this anymore but don’t bother cleaning it up” is what “delete” means all throughout the internet. Following a tradition that goes back to BBSes, Usenet, and MS-DOS.
Trying to delete in social media is like trying to un-publish yesterday’s printed newspaper. Maybe it’d be sensible to label the action “hide” or “declaim”, but that’s probably a whole seperate topic.
No. Delete means to remove from database, no recovery. Nowhere in the English language semantically will you find that “delete” implies that you can recover it. If you delete it from Lemmy, then it should be wiped, if another user saved it then there’s nothing that can really be done. As far as the hardware you are executing “delete” should follow that command.
Delete means to remove from database, no recovery
From a technical standpoint, this was not at all the case historically. By the time we moved from floppy disks to standard UNIX commands the presumption was that your data would be backed up and thus recoverable, and early RDBMs treated the equivalent to a DELETE SQL command the same way FAT did.
Nowhere in the English language semantically will you find that “delete” implies that you can recover it.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/518243/origin-of-the-word-delete
Delete as originally brought into English from Latin referred to smuding out in your wax slate, and later blotting out your writing to hide a mistake. In both ancient usages the mistake was potentially recoverable, a non-contradicting inference that continued on to the computer age.
Note that we don’t generally say “delete” to mean “remove unrecoverably” in other contexts, either. The rules for handling classified material do not merely say “delete”, but always compound it with qualifiers or expansive instructions such as “delete unrecoverably” or “delete files and backups”.
As far as the hardware you are executing “delete” should follow that command.
Final point: the actions of a user with regard to their posts on Lemmy are not hardware commands. They are pure software concepts that interact with a distributed and abstracted system that is several steps removed from such.
Delete as originally brought into English from Latin referred to smuding out in your wax slate,
You de-lete it. So it was previously leeted. Or, if you will, 13373d.
Damn you stretched, you really can undo smudging ink? No more time for this https://www.etymonline.com/word/delete
I like undo. For a while. Perhaps something like, you can undelete for 12 hours after deletion, after that it’s permanent?
