This should be a pretty basic feature, just not having a private message be there anymore. But for some reason that does not work here?
I tried searching for this. I found a year old open issue on GitHub and some reddit users complaining about this very issue.
Talking with some people in the comments here, it seems like some people don’t understand that one might not want a message to be in their face. Or the idea that just because something could be recovered doesn’t mean we should treat it as an absolute
Not just federated systems, things like the Wayback Machine exist too, web crawlers, people can save websites too (every web browser has a save option), or you can self host an archiving crawler if you want to backup a certain website, data hoarders exist.