That is to say if they are deleted do they persist on federated servers? If not where do you host images?
Not really, you should assume anything you post will be public and can’t be deleted. When you delete a post or comment, your server will ask others it’s federating with to also delete it, most of the time they will respect that. However, a server could just ignore the request and keep it anyway, there really isn’t anything that can be done about this unfortunately.
Edit: Using another image host like imgur could give you more control to delete your images. However, it’s still fairly trivial for a server to just download the image while it’s up and store it locally.
Yeah, I’m not really that concerned about images persisting- just prefer the ability to remove it from Lemmy(aka easily searchable)
Deleting posts does make them difficult to search, but it’s inevitable that at some point that there’ll be searchable Lemmy archives (probably already exists tbh), If your ok with that.
Doesn’t this make it much harder for bots and influence ops to hide their behavior, unless they’re working directly with the admin of the instance they’re manipulating? I think that makes this worth it.
Much like you can’t really un-send an email or erase a usenet post after you post it, public federated systems give you less control over your messages after you send them.