mastodon as a software and as a project ethos has zero regard for people who want to delete all their toots and start over on their same old handle. if you delete your account you WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GET YOUR OLD HANDLE BACK WITHOUT BREAKING FEDERATION AND THE LOCAL INSTANCE DATABASE
@bea yes, it's not without warning. but it's not a good stance.
@bea also, "undeleting cannot be done" is ambiguous and not the same as "you will never have your old handle back but without your old toots"
@squirrel sorry the part i was thinking of is actually outside the box
"This will permanently, irreversibly remove content from your account and deactivate it. Your username will remain reserved to prevent future impersonations."
@bea still doesn't imply irreversibleness towards the username. "reserved" sounds like it could be reactivated.
@bea and honestly, it should be.
@squirrel @bea Yeah, we need to revise account deletion. :/ In my mind we need three options:
* Erase all user data except the username and password, don't disable login, allow the user to start fresh
* Erase all user data except the username and password, but disable login so the username can't be taken by someone else
* Erase all user data including the username, so the username can be taken by someone else
@noelle @bea I think deleting all user data (including propagating to remote instances so followers stop following the account, which is my issue specifically) and suspending the account so an admin has to unsuspend and maybe change the password so it can be used again is a good compromise, if the account can then be used again with no user data remaining.
@noelle Oh, sure. I totally get the motivation there. But IMHO their right to return their username to the free pool is outweighed by my right to know who I’m talking to.
Sample worst case: the “LGBTQ suicide hotline” gets bored and moves on. An alt-right re-registered the abandoned account. Another user resumes their in-profess conversation, not knowing it’s someone else now.
Historically, that a very dangerous anti-feature.
@tek Granted.
@noelle Email analogy: Yahoo mail works like this. If you delete your account, I can take it over and then use it to reset any website passwords where that’s your recovery email. Ok, so Mastodon isn’t email, but that’s an example of how unexpected this can go. I designed the user accounts system at my company explicitly never to allow reactivating a deleted account. Google does the same, for the same reasons.
@tek I'm agreeing with you, you don't have to keep convincing me. :)
@squirrel it is in the red warning box on the delete page...