[emseetech]

That's not entirely true. The big platforms yes, but that's a combination of economic incentives and technical challenges at scale (such as moving data to cold storage).

But even then, that means there's resistance, but that's not the same as things being technically impossible. In federated systems, a delete is not a delete. It can't be because there's no way to confirm deletion on nodes you can't control.

And I understand your perspective as a realist on deletion generally, but that's not most social media users understanding when they're told they can control their own data, which is a common selling point of federation.

A centralized system which is properly incentivized to completely wipe all data associated with an account will be able do so, but a federated system can't.