The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete. Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it. Additionally, a user cannot generate delete requests if they get banned from their server or the server shuts down. Users and server admins can't control whether another server permits archiving of their content. Mastodon and other fediverse software allows following public posts by RSS, and RSS clients might keep them forever.

The only reasonable understanding is that these protocols are for for publishing to the public. It is not possible to reliably retract anything published to thousands of other peoples' computers. We used to try to teach people that the internet is forever, and that's even more true with federated protocols. That doesn't make them a bad idea.

You can care a lot about plausible deniability and the ability to delete your own data, but it seems a bit weird to denounce a whole ecosystem as "generally a bad idea" on those grounds, when that is a deliberate anti-goal of the system design.

Don't use it if you don't like it. Some of us like the strong identity and content verification.

The community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy

What? You don't even need to understand how Mastodon works in depth to realize that sending a post to 500 different servers owned by completely different people in completely different jurisdictions is going to make it harder to delete later.