this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Slrpnk and lemmy are great, and I understand they are volunteer driven. With this post I don't mean to be pushy, and I'm grateful for this place and the software, but I hope it's useful to point out where there might be trouble for users down the line:

So I might be missing something, but there seems to be no way to delete a private message, not even after reporting it. Given the nasty things some people may send just to mess with somebody, this seems like a dangerous omission to me that is at a high risk to lead to grief if not addressed at some point. Is there some bug tracker where perhaps this omission could be best pointed out?

My apologies if I'm missing something however. Perhaps I'm just too silly to see the button, it's happened before.

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No you're absolutely right and it's dumb as bricks.

Right now the only person who can delete a PM is the sender, not the recipient.
The recipient can mark it as read, but that doesn't help much.
Your local admin can do it for you in the database, for recipients local to the instance.
There currently is no way for a local admin to trigger federation of deletion of PMs sent to remote users either.
Although I think there's a Pull Request that implements the "removed" state.
I imagine that would trigger on bans that remove content.
I'm not sure if this will be exposed to users or just admins.

[โ€“] poVoq@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This would be something to suggest on the upstream Lemmy issue tracker, but I am relatively sure they are already aware but for some reason did not find the time to implement this (or found it unimportant). I somewhat suspect though that this is not so easy to implement as DMs are AFAIK internally not much different from regular posts, and it is generally not possible for regular users to delete posts or comments by other users.

IMHO it would be probably best to add an user profile option to block DMs in general and that at least should be easy to implement.

However, if you receive repeated unwanted DMs from a specific account you can block that user and that will also prevent future DMs from reaching you.