A user‑level version of that, or a proper “deleted” ActivityPub signal, would give people far more control than the current soft‑delete model.
This quite literally already exists.
When you delete posts, comments or PMs, the ActivityPub message is a deletion. How other servers handle this depends on the software, some immediately delete the data, others will retain it for some time and trigger a delayed deletion. Others may not delete it at all. Likewise, if you delete your profile in Lemmy, you have the option to select whether your content should get deleted along with it.
With Lemmy, some of these actions are not always instantly deleting data from the database. For example, if you delete a post or comment, you still have the option to undelete it to restore the original content. From a moderation perspective, it is crucial to not purge everything from the DB without a trace immediately, as this would easily allow abuse by bad actors.
at this point they're long past the point where they'd be tolerated here to keep a single account. they're constantly impersonating and harassing other people, they need the new accounts to be able to evade bans.
feel free to get in touch with us if you have issues with api limits. we can't change them for individual users but we may be able to give you advice on more efficient usage.
your bot shouldn't be logging in every time it checks what is going on; it's best to persist the JWT you get from logging in and keep using it. the signup/login rate limit (which for whatever reason has the same counter) is relatively low to limit abuse, but the other endpoints should be more relaxed. you'd also have to hit pretty high request counts for us to even look at it. i recommend using a separate bot account (see bot rules).
most reports will only be seen by community moderators on our instance. We're typically seeing about 100-200 post/comment reports on any given day, and we don't have the capacity to look at all of them on admin level. If you need to report something to our admin team the best option is to message @lwreport@lemmy.world, which will go straight to our admin team. This does however not make Lemmy's built-in reports useless. Lemmy does not store an edit history for posts and comments currently, but your report stores a snapshot of the contents at that point in time in our DB, which we can look up even if the community moderator resolved the report already.
I think this might currently be a bug in PieFed. Some other PieFed admins have been reporting issues with the active user counts being off as well. I'm not sure if PieFed uses the same logic to count active users as Lemmy, but that could be another source of difference. Looking through the last couple posts they seem to all have federated along with all their comments and at least most of the votes (1 or 2 votes were missing but that can happen sometimes).
I've transferred the community to you. I've also added your LW alt as community mod, as some mod actions (at least adding new mods) still has some issues when done from a different instance, and you won't be able to receive and resolve all reports from another instances.
At least one of the moderators is still active, I've just sent them a message to confirm whether they're still interested in moderating this community.
unfortunately, the tooling natively available in lemmy is rather limited, and identifying these accounts automatically without having a decent chance of false positives is challenging. there are already some measures we've implemented, but the stricter we become the more we risk affecting legitimate users with this.
This quite literally already exists.
When you delete posts, comments or PMs, the ActivityPub message is a deletion. How other servers handle this depends on the software, some immediately delete the data, others will retain it for some time and trigger a delayed deletion. Others may not delete it at all. Likewise, if you delete your profile in Lemmy, you have the option to select whether your content should get deleted along with it.
With Lemmy, some of these actions are not always instantly deleting data from the database. For example, if you delete a post or comment, you still have the option to undelete it to restore the original content. From a moderation perspective, it is crucial to not purge everything from the DB without a trace immediately, as this would easily allow abuse by bad actors.