I deleted them at about the same time, both on different instances. One is empty, from perspective of my new instance, but the other one shows all the posts. What am I supposed to do? I share some of my personal stuff online as means of venting so I can possibly reflect through unbiased responses from strangers and I’m comfortable with it, as long as I have control over my “content”, so to speak. I’m not sure what to do now.
How long ago did you delete it? Deletions are federated just like anything else, so it can take a while for deletions to federate out to all instances sometimes. Deleted accounts are particularly hard-hitting on instance resources because it’s a lot of changes all at once. Small instances can actually go down for a few seconds when a large account gets deleted somewhere on the Fediverse.
As with all things open source it’ll probably improve slowly but steadily over time.
What happens if the posts were from an instance that was later defederated from the current instance?
Or was running an old (and now incomparable) version of the software?
If two instances defederate, then the servers aren’t “talking” to each other anymore, meaning anything after defederation doesn’t get synced. So yeah, if you had an account, then your instance defederated, and then you deleted the account, your posts from before could still be theorhetically readable on the defederated instance. Admins can easily purge accounts from the database, so it wouldn’t hurt to reach out if you said something regretfull that was still visible.
I don’t think the second scenario is capable of happening (yet) since ActivityPub is backwards compatible.