One extra nuance is revision history.
From looking at PostRevisor, edit history is stored separately through PostRevision, so I am not suggesting that an own-content deletion permission should necessarily hard-delete revision records or remove auditability.
The permission I am imagining is more about ordinary user-facing visibility: whether the author can withdraw their own post/topic, whether the deleted-post placeholder remains, whether ordinary users can view previous edit content, and whether staff/moderators retain whatever audit/moderation access is appropriate (e.g via the “VIEW N HIDDEN REPLY”)
So the split I am asking for is not:
- “let users erase all traces from the database”
but rather:
- “let users have more control over their own visible content/footprint”
- without also granting them global powers to delete other users’ content or see deleted content generally.