Feature request: an option to deactivate or delete your account
Before posting this, I checked my user settings page, the site’s documentation, and GitLab. I also did some site:tildes.net Google searches and used the on-site search for the ~tildes group.
I saw that on GitLab there is a feature request for account deletion, but not deactivation, that was marked “Accepted” about 5-6 years ago (August 2019).
I also saw some posts here in the ~tildes group, including one from about 6-7 years ago (June 2018) with a comment that said an option for both account deletion and account "dissociation" was planned. Both of these features sound great.
In addition to account deletion and account dissociation, I want to also request an option for account deactivation.
I don’t want to ask for the Moon here, but I envision account deactivation as having the option to remove all your posts and comments from the site (as well as your profile), with the option of restoring them if you reactivate your account. (I don’t know how annoying or how much effort this would be to code. I’m just imagining what I would find ideal from a user perspective.)
Another wonderful bonus would be the option to set a timer limiting your ability to reactivate your account, e.g. don’t let me reactivate my account for 6 months.
In the past, I’ve done this on another site through an elaborate system where I:
- Set up two-factor authentication.
- Saved the two-factor recovery code on an encrypted pastebin in a password-protected paste.
- Saved the password for the paste in my password manager.
- Used FutureMe.org to send an email with a link to the paste to myself X amount of time in the future.
- Deleted the link to the paste from my browser history.
- Deleted the entry for the site from my two-factor authentication app so the recovery code is the only way to get in.
This works, but it’s an elaborate process and if something goes wrong with FutureMe.org or the paste bin site, you could lose your ability to ever reactivate your account. You have to be willing to take that risk!
I might end up implementing this wacky system again for Tildes. For a site like Tildes, if I permanently lost access to my account (due to FutureMe.org shutting down or suffering data loss, for example) and wanted to re-join the site at some point in the future, I guess the worst consequence would be losing my username. (Also, getting an invite again might be a hassle, I don’t know.) That might be unfortunate depending how much you like your username, but it’s not as bad as a site with follows and followers where you would lose all of those.
It is my humble opinion that deleting comments/posts should be a somewhat arduous process. Link rot is a problem on the internet and always has been. Comment rot is a problem in fewer places, but it's an issue on, e.g. reddit.
If there's some good reason, one should be able to contact Deimos and have him assist. Otherwise, it's not that hard to go through and delete. I know because I did it when I left before. Which in hindsight I regret.
It's my opinion that the community's right to the contents of the community generally outweigh the individual's right to mass-delete. However, I think there are certainly cases to be made for allowing that - in which case, having the site admin step in in those rare circumstances is probably acceptable.
These are all my opinions. :)
Also just my opinion, but I hard, hard disagree with this stance. Link rot is such a minor inconvenience to deal with compared to the vital importance of every individual's right to be forgotten... but specifically their right to delete their own user created data from social media sites, which I think every country should enshrine, and mandate be made easy to accomplish, and result in actual thorough deletion of that data (after 30 days, which is the mandatory data retention period in many jurisdictions, for perfectly understandable reasons IMO).
As for why, all you need do is look at reddit, which still retains all user data, albeit in a dissociated form, even after you "delete" your account. And now with AI companies hoovering up all that data, the growing threat of fascism in the US and other parts of the world, and increased dangers facing LGBT+, other minorities, and politically left-leaning people as a result, I think retaining even "dissociated" personal information when a user explicitly chose to "delete" their account is not only irresponsible, but also potentially incredibly dangerous. Especially since deanonymization is not particularly difficult when you have years or even decades worth of that user's social media history to rifle through and cross reference against non-anonymized information about them.
When removing your account, you can request deimos to also remove your content. That is the case already. No reasoning is required.
Account deletion/dissociation is already an option... it's just a manual process right now. From @Deimos:
-Source
Account deactivation is a neat new idea though. Added to Tildes' Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/830
Yeah I was looking into the deletion policy recently and Tildes is actually better than most sites in that regard. Unlike Reddit, Tildes doesn’t store your comment history indefinitely. After 30 days, all edit history and deleted comments are deleted from Tildes servers. Also, if you delete your account, all your comments and account data is deleted after 30 days.
Thank you for adding that to GitLab. I appreciate that.
If you know where to ask it isn't hard to get an invitation code. However that wasn't true during periods of high demand like the reddit API exodus.
Yeah, invites are definitely not hard to get. I still check /r/tildes every single day and send out invites to nearly* everyone that asks for one in the 'Official Invite Requests' threads I post every month.
* - except obvious spammers, trolls, etc.
Thank you everyone for your input on this post.
I'm going to implement the elaborate self-imposed deactivation method I described in this post for Tildes.
I reduced the risk of permanently losing my account by using multiple "send an email to yourself in the future" services in addition to FutureMe.org and multiple encrypted pastebins (with password-protected pastes) for the 2FA recovery codes. Something would have to go wrong with multiple sites for this method not to work. I think this is a good system! I would like more people to know about this idea when they're feeling conflicted about using a certain Internet platform and are contemplating deleting their account.
I have set things up to lock myself out of my Tildes account for the next 6 months.
I will not be deleting any of my comments or posts for now. I will not be deleting or "dissociating" my account for now. I see both sides of the argument and feel ambivalent about this topic. I see the importance of user autonomy/control over our own data. I also see the importance of digital archiving and I think there should be limits to how much someone can control copies of their words once they're published, e.g., I don't think an author should be allowed to "recall" a book from book stores and libraries once it's published. (You could draw analogies between a Reddit/Tildes/forum/Twitter/Bluesky user and different things... I'm not sure which analogy should set the precedent, if any. Free and universally accessible digital self-publishing is a new technology to which our traditions don't fully apply.)
I don't have a strong reason to want to delete my comments or posts off the site. The only reason I would have to do that is I'm upset that I've had a bad overall experience with the site and I want to take my ball and go home. A stronger reason to keep everything up is if I want to reference it later for some reason (it sometimes happens).
I may or may not use Tildes again when my recovery keys get emailed to me in 6 months. That is a decision for my future self to think about.
In the time that I spend off Tildes (at least 6 months, maybe longer, maybe forever), I will try to figure out what I get out of sites like Tildes and try to figure out alternatives that give me that but don't give me the stuff I don't like. By "alternative", I don't necessarily mean a social media site or online community. That could be one alternative. But maybe the problems I've been experiencing are inherent to and inevitable in any social media site or any large online community. I don't know yet.
I wish everyone on Tildes well. May you be safe, may you have peace, may you find joy and hope, may you be free.