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A month ago I saw a person asking about peer-to-peer messaging.
This is very good, seeing people interested in this topic, which is an important topic for everyone.
Why I think it is important? Well, peer-to-peer (and in that regard all decentralised) messengers remove the dependence on centralised, for-profit services.
It takes control and gives it back to the people.
Even though commercial messengers don't read your content (most of them, at least), the metadata of it can and will still be used to puzzle together an image of you. And if the company you are giving your data to is Facebook[Meta], well, that's just cruel.
The question was whether peer-to-peer messengers allow message deletion akin to Discord.
This got me thinking about message deletion in general: Is it a good thing?
I think "message deletion" the way Discord makes it seem to be transmits a false image.
Every client is capable of recording messages and keeping them indefinitely.
Discord don't allow this, of course, but they can't prevent it from ever happening.
The effect of this is that people will make statements that were not well thought over: ones that they might regret moments or months later.
Of course it's nice that Discord allow people to delete messages. It's convenient.
And, to be fair, the chance that someone who happens to run BetterDiscord and a recorder for deleted messages wants to keep logs of every message for months is slim, so perhaps it is possible to fully "erase" a statement, is it?
Sure, it may be possible for single messages, though images seem to take more than "instantaneously" to be removed. [^1]
But a bigger problem may arise: Discord notoriously don't delete the content you put onto the internet when you choose to delete your account. [^2]
How this is legal I don't know, hopefully it isn't. Not allowing for full message deletion is dangerous especially when paired with having a young audience, which Discord have.
Young people are often not very careful when it comes to sharing private information. After actively using Discord for even a few months it becomes a tedious task to delete all messages.
Even if someone were to have a change of mind and delete their account believing that it will delete what they've said on Discord, everything will still be fully readable, with only a change of display name to "Deleted User".
The fact that Discord don't allow this to be a simple and easy task is wholly irresponsible. A flaw that must be mitigated *immediately*.
It might be the fault of the user for not informing themselves about the footprint they leave using a platform, but just watching as it grows and grows and not acting upon it when being repeatedly asked to implement a mass delete feature makes one but a culprit.
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[^1] The longest I've noticed must have been several hours.
[^2] Full message deletion is a requested feature, however Discord doesn't act on it.
Source 2 [support.discord.com]
tags: tech
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~konomo CC-BY-NC-4.0