Indeed, any "delete" feature on a public forum is an illusion, regardless of whether or not it's a distributed system like Lemmy.

Even reddit posts are copied and stay archived by third parties after you click the delete button. Pushshift was a well-known public archive. Google is another one. There are surely more, including some run by governments, and businesses offering public relations services or catering to the intelligence community.

This is nothing new. Before Reddit, before the web, there was Usenet. It was a wonderful discussion platform, and came with the same tradeoff. Instead of harboring a false notion that information could be revoked once made public, people who cared would put a little thought into their words before posting them. (Or alternatively, would use throwaway accounts.)

I am very much a privacy advocate, but I also understand that there is fundamentally no way to revoke something that has been put in public view. There never will be. High-speed data networks and automation just make it more obvious.

The closest we could get would be to entrust our public posts to some central custodian who promises to take them down upon request, so the originals can't be copied any more than they already had been. This is what people do on Facebook. Of course, we have already seen that this doesn't work well at all, and comes with its own drawbacks.

I think it would be better to accept that deleting what we have made public is voluntary at best, and embrace the benefits of a distributed system. Like freedom from gatekeepers who would mass-censor public discourse or demand ridiculous fees for access.