

It’s harder to delete things here than on non-federated services because everything you do here gets copied to lots of other servers, which are supposed to delete things when you do, but it’s impossible to guarantee that they always will (on purpose or by mistake).
I once deleted a comment here almost immediately after saving it, but then still got multiple upvotes for it. I found out that this was because one big instance hadn’t deleted it for whatever reason and its users had no idea that I’d meant to delete it.


not really, every Lemmy instance has an owner…
What federation is is that every Lemmy instance gets some of its data not just from its users, but also from other Lemmy instances. You can think of each Lemmy instance as one mini-reddit, in principle there is no difference between reddit and one single Lemmy instance. Federation means that Lemmy instances copy their data from/to each other so that you can talk to users who use other ones too.