@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.

@bea @noelle this is exactly what I expected to already happen, by the way.

@squirrel @noelle i think suspending is already supposed to do this so i'm wondering if there is a bug, federation weirdness, or it's an omission

@bea @noelle no, @squ1rrel was properly deleted from the control panel and it is now just as broken as @squirrel was when i had to delete its account record to be able to recreate it

@noelle @squirrel yeah that seems alright, should be pretty easy to do

for 3 i do worry about the scenario where toots from the old user are still in the wild and people will find the new user from them

@bea @noelle @squirrel the second option seems like it's just a best practice. you deactivate your account and it's just a tombstone

@noelle @squirrel @bea I think #3 is a bad idea. If I’m AFK for a while and come back to PM “noelle@“, I want that to either 1) be the same person I already know, or 2) fail because they no longer exist. I do *not* want it to be an imposter, under any circumstances.

@tek @squirrel @bea I tend to agree, but I have heard a LOT of complaints from people who want to delete their account and free up the username. (This was largely back in... May? When m.s got that huge influx of Tumblr kids who also got REALLY mad that they couldn't CHANGE their username.)

@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. :)