Conversation

Notices

1. Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 01:58:32 UTC Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

   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...

   • Simbionte (santiago@mastodon.uy)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 01:58:29 UTC Simbionte

     in reply to

     @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.

   • Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 02:31:06 UTC Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     • Simbionte

     @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?

   • Simbionte (santiago@mastodon.uy)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 02:32:00 UTC Simbionte

     in reply to

     @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.

   • Simbionte (santiago@mastodon.uy)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 03:08:35 UTC Simbionte

     in reply to

     • Eugen 💀

     @siderea that kept me thinking, i think comments to your toots will remain but the account handle will not have the link to the profile, i think i saw that before. I should check that up or ask @Gargron about it.

   • Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 03:08:37 UTC Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     • Simbionte

     @santiago

     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?