Reddit traditionally did not purge comments and posts when a user deleted their account. Prior to the API protest in May/June 2023, it was common to encounter posts and comments by [deleted] that were still fully readable.
Lemmy has encouraged total deletion of content upon account removal.
I think a community should have retention policy:
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How much old data to retain for performance reasons. communities like memes seem to churn and repeat content in variations - do people really read memes from 60 days ago?
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Allow retention in technical and specialized topics for search engine / historic stability. A policy that ‘posting in this community will not be deleted upon account deletion’. Maybe the user has to consent to this with a prompt on their first post or comment?
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Remote instances may not want to retain years of content and purge it to only keep the most recent 30 or 60 days for storage and liability reasons, etc. So settings per-community on retention / automatic removal…