@samtoland Keep in mind though that Mastodon can only send deletion requests to other instances, and if such a request doesn't reach somewhere there may be lingering traces of content
@elomatreb
@samtoland
But maybe toots should actually leave their home server with information pertaining to their future: "Delete me by X, my contents are CC-BY-SA, I only authorise redistribution on platforms licensed under a FSF approved license"
@cathal @samtoland This may address the lingering content problem, but esp. that last suggestion is probably ill-fated since such things are just requests to the platform anyway (similar to how visibility restrictions only work by cooperation)
@elomatreb
@samtoland If I'm not mistaken, the question of my copyrights and licenses over my toots are between me and my homeserver. I authorise my home server to grant a license to other servers in the Fediverse to enable federation. There's nothing saying my home server and I can't stipulate additional rules, and servers receiving copyrighted content without a license would be in trouble if they didn't comply. I realise, this is all ignored under current implementations.
@samtoland you could always write a Python script.
If you have a spare machine (or a Raspberry Pi) you could then set it to run once a day with cron.
Its task would be to download your toots, then delete all toot IDs where the post date is before today - fixed period of time.
The Mastodon.py library would save you having to do REST requests.
@samtoland
https://ephemeral.glitch.social/ is an instance that does this. If you want something less fun, you'll have to modify your own instance and submit a PR upstream.
@samtoland If there isn't.. Mastodon has a pretty good API and I'm sure this could be scripted easily.
@jsmall a kind person showed me this.
@samtoland @jsmall Ack, I was just about to suggest the same XD
@samtoland @jsmall I'm not but it's the first such tool that pops into my head, if not the only one. 😅
@samtoland Not inside of Mastodon that I know of; there is this, though https://forget.codl.fr/about/
@samtoland *hears wistful sighs of social history grad students a century hence*
@samtoland I'm not too keen on the idea of instances auto-deleting old toots - I personally like to think there is a permanent record out there of my toots that I could look back to even if no-one else wants to! But it would seem a good idea to have a feature for users to control how long their toots 'live', with a warning note that it may not be possible to enforce deletion by all instances.
@samtoland I'm new to #mastodon, but technically speaking, once you published *anything* on the Internet and *someone* has seen it, there's already 2 copies of it (browser cache and stuff like that).
If someone want to save anything you published, they just need to keep a local (to them) copy and you can't really force them not-to. It's a hard problem to solve.
Take #signalapp for example: they have self-destructing messages, but you can still take a screenshot.
@samtoland
https://forget.codl.fr/about/
"Forget is a service that automatically deletes your old posts that everyone has forgotten about. Shouldn't databases forget too?"