I was wondering, if I ever want to delete a post or an account on a service that uses ActivityPub, like Mastodon or Pixelfed, is it going to persist across the fediverse?

Let's say I made a political post on Mastodon using a profile with my real name and picture and I need to travel to the U.S. for work purposes and I don't want the CBP to find out about it and get turned back or arrested on entry.

If I delete this post, will it be completely removed across all instances that synchronized it?

Is a deleted post traceable in any way?

Is it kept in a log or a database on ferdiverse instances?

With governments across the globe increasingly surveiling us online and scrutinizing everything we say, I'm starting to think I should plainly delete any account that has personally identifiable information like my real name and photo. I initially thought it would be easier to connect with family and friends, but now I'm growing increasingly worried about how this can be used against me.

I just want to know if I can completely erase any post or any account from the fediverse or if there will always be a trace somewhere and it could get picked up by any government surveilance. Whether encrypted or not.

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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 5 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

There will be a trace. First of all, the way the Fediverse it set up, the instances all cooperate from distributing posts and comments, to deleting them. There's no guarantee every instance does it (correctly). And as the Fediverse is made up of different software, it also depends on the specific implementation.

And then we also have AI scrapers, the Wayback Machine and other internet archives. It'll end up there as well.

So better treat everything as easily traceable which you post in public. And it's notoriously difficult to really remove stuff from the internet anyway.

Plus the US has some absurdly large datacenters for surveillance. Idk if it's clever to lie to them about your social media history. They certainly have the capacity to scrape posts and store them forever.