When a thread on Reddit is deleted or removed, it just deletes the OP, but the comments remain. Here, the whole thing gets nuked, which really sucks.
It's frustrating for me as well. I'd sometimes like to go back and look at a conversation I had once before - so I don't have to manually unearth whatever point or evidence I had in that post - only to find I'm actually unable to.
What really frustrates me is that if a post is removed or - it seems like - the parent of comment of a conversational thread, I become unable to view any discussion in that post's comments or conversational thread. I get that people might want to remove their own posts, and that's just fine - but one person removing my ability to view anything else in the comments doesn't seem great.
Thought I'd recently seen a Lemmy dev comment about fixing this... and I found it. It's coming!
Oh! That is very good. Sounds like a nice balance of "ability to remove yourself" and "ability for others to find their comments" too.
Screenshot for the lazy, or who don't want to/can't see lemmy.ml threads.
I find people deleting their post after a few answers have been provided to be a problem here on asklemmy. As a mod I sometimes serve a relatively short ban when this happens for no real reason. While it isn't explicitly against the rules, I find it very much to be against the spirit of the board, and it's really not fair to the ones who took their time to write a response nobody will ever read.
I think if the post is older than 7 days, its fair game to delete it. I mean, if it was really that important, you should've archive it.
Any deeply personal stuff like mental health or relationship stuff is also fair to delete like... whenever OP no longer feels comfortable it.
Both are fair points. In the latter case I think OPs of such post should, as a courtesy, add a note that they intend to delete.
I've never seen a post I made deleted other than the ones I had on my first instance which I had to abonden.
Look for example at this almost on year old post of mine: https://piefed.jeena.net/post/84273 there are some accounts marked as [deleted] but their content is still there.
The longevity is in the Fediverse. Even after lemmy.ee server has gone ofline my old community content is there. Moreover i've transferred the group on Piefed before the server shutdown, so technically i have two backup of the old content now.
That's not exactly accessible, I have several threads in my history that appear to be gone. Supposedly they exist somewhere in the verse but I really don't feel like hunting them down. To be honest I'm not even sure how I'd start going about trying to hunt them down even if i wanted too
The posters probably deleted their post. I've seen some bots doing that (or maybe getting banned) when somebody calls them out.
I think everyone has a right to delete their posts.
I also think that you should, for all intents and purposes, treat every post as a public permanent record. Anyone can just use archive.today and grab a snapshot.
If you think a post is worth archiving, you should make a copy for yourself instead of hoping that OP never deletes it..
I agree that people should be able to delete their posts, but the problem is that they end up nuking everything in the comments itself.
Ideally it should be handled in a similar way to how Reddit does it: The post itself is "deleted" but the comments remain.
Yes, but that's more of software problem, can't blame any OPs for it.
Hmm... so in Piefed, a moderator can remove a post, but is unable view the post again in order to restore it. So there seems to be no way to undo an accidental deletion of a post... 🤔
Hum, why do you say this about Piefed when I linked a Lemmy pull request?
Because I'm testing federation stuff with a alt Piefed account. I noticed you are using Piefed, so I thought its relevent. Any changes to Lemmy wouldn't apply to Piefed.
Ah, it makes sense yes. What you said before shouldn't be the case, a mod should be able to see a post they have removed. Which Piefed instance are you using?
FYI @rimu@piefed.social and @wjs018@piefed.social
piefed.social
I also managed to break federation after adding this Lemmy account as a mod, then this account, as a lower-ranking mod, was able to remove my original piefed account as the top mod (at least when views from that one Lemmy instance)
Same with a Lemmy community, add the piefed account as mod, then the piefed account was able to issue a ban to the Lemmy account that's the top mod.
Weird.
It seems like a lot of instances are purging old posts. Which makes sense as the operators are paying to store them and it isn’t cheap to continually add storage for rarely accessed content. I don’t know a real good way around it other than just having the bigger instances that are willing to archive everything just not respect deletion requests which I don’t think is ideal either.
Ultimately I think it’s probably best to consider these posts ephemeral. And using a clipping service to store information we want to retain on our own hard drives. It will prevent Lenny from being used as a knowledge repository but I don’t know how else you can make it cost effective otherwise. It’s not like Lemmy is making anyone money
(1) some communities choose to delete their posts periodically after some time period. Usually they clearly say this in their sidebar. Communities dedicated to memes - where fresh turnover is expected - are going to be more likely to use such practices than those dedicated to discussions of scientific topics.
(2) The Threadiverse does not currently inform you when your content has been removed by a moderator or admin. The only way you find out that happened is when you go looking for it and poof it's gone, or if you are a weirdo who constantly checks the modlog for your account name for some reason. I think Lemmy is going to add a feature to change this in the near future? Here is yours - the phenomena is rare for you but not absent, e.g. perhaps you are wondering about your post "What's with the insane level of recalls of late?" - well now you know, the mod did not like it.
(3) As others have said, the longevity is in the Threadiverse, but unless you self-host your own instance, so long as you rely on some other instance admins and post to some other community where you are not a moderator, you have given up control to others to take care of your content, on their terms. This will never not be true, so the longevity here lies in the fact that unlike Reddit or X or Bluesky, we are not controlled by a single monolithic profit-hungry corporate entity - e.g. it is not possible to spin up your own little Reddit, but you can spin up your own little PieFed, Lemmy, or Mbin (or Mastodon, Friendica, etc.). So you can have longevity here, if the admins and mods want that, whereas on Reddit you couldn't really.
Very relevant, thank you. @rimu@piefed.social may want to do the same for Piefed - e.g. if someone asks a technicial question and a bunch of people provide very helpful answers, then OP deleting the question perhaps should not have total control over the answers to it, for someone that has a direct link to the conversation.
We discussed it a few weeks ago: https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/3-general/topic/Keep.20comments.20of.20deleted.20posts/with/7377
If Lemmy got as big as Reddit, this would be an even larger problem. As a server admin, I'd like not to store several hundred gigs of text per day because someone subscribes to an active community. Unlike Reddit, Lemmy servers are not run by a company that can endlessly lose venture capitalists money.
posts last a long time because there isn't enough new content to push them off the front pages.
as for posts not existing, just think that is the user deleting them?
Mods and admins also delete posts. I have some comments I really liked that nobody can see the context of now because the post got deleted.
And entire instances can vanish.
And entire instances can vanish
But when they do, their entire repository of posts has already been copied to every other instance across the entire Threadiverse.
e.g. here is DMV.social's goodbye message, hosted on beehaw.
That will be a very welcome change. Having the entire comment section disappear with the opening post is a little annoying
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