When a remote actor is deleted, is it implied that all attributed objects (notes, media, etc.) should be tombstoned?
I’m trying to work out the behavior and display of content by actors that don’t exist anymore. I understand that in some ways this is more of a UI issue than a spec issue, but I didn’t see anything in it that describes what happens to an actor’s content when the actor is gone.
In terms of local content, because of conflicting desires for immutable URIs and security, implementations are allowed to do what they want. Some will present a Tombstone that acknowledges content was there once but is no longer there, some will present a 404 response that does not acknowledge any content ever existed there. When dealing with remote content, implementations should, ideally, act only as a cache for the remote server and not make any assumptions about whether it is using Tombstones or removing the content entirely. Where this is impractical, they should probably default to just removing the object and not tombstoning it.
I’m not aware of any implementation that allows for a deleting actor but allowing the activities attributed to that actor to live on. It’s completely feasible for such an implementation to exist, but I think sending the Delete { Actor } activity for it probably doesn’t make a whole ton of sense, and I think given the current state-of-the-fediverse, it’s totally reasonable to assume Delete { Actor } means “delete all of the objects and activities attributed to this actor”.
That all makes sense.
I’m leaning towards proactively tombstoning local content as a sort of “cach warmup”, knowing that it’ll either be tombstoned or unavailable in the future. Thanks much.