Meta (slrpnk.net)

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.

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.

I've mentioned this before. I got scolded at for having feelings. Some admins and/or devs had the argument that nothing could ever be guaranteed to be completely wiped from the internet. So why would anyone want to not see things that bother them?

I run client side filtering now. Server side filtering would be more efficient for both the client and server. And it saves data. It would be a big improvement.

But until the devs realize that there's life outsjde of their mom's basement, there might not be much change.