Please don’t expect the community to give you answers to your questions which you then delete right afterwards. Those of us who put time into answering your questions are not doing so just to serve your personal needs, we are here to help build a community knowledge base that others can search and reference.
This has become a chronic issue with Lemmy and its starting to feel like it’s a waste of time to answer questions.
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Quote ppl you answer.
works for deleted comments, but not when the entire post is nuked
works for deleted comments, but not when the entire post is nuked
True
that will help somewhat in the future when lemmy gets its shit together, but since I came to lemmy deleted posts cannot be loaded at all, even though the server still has the comments
Quote ppl you answer.
indeed
Why does this need a post? Just don’t respond?
I found this an interesting point worth thinking about. And I kinda agree, why delete good information.
Because I have no idea if the questioner is going to do that beforehand
You never will!
So the answer to your question is: to discourage that behaviour.
Yes.
How the fuck are you supposed to know the person you’re answering will or won’t delete the post after?
You won’t.
So… Just let the community die? That’s your suggestion? 😑
It’s a “float to the top” scenario. We can’t assume some one person will arbitrate.
Okay I’m just gonna call somebody out - Imperious_melange just deleted a thread with over 200 upvotes where a thriving discussion was underway. It was about whether people perceived a pro-China and anti-west sentiment on Lemmy. I tried to post a reply and the site said “deleted by creator”. The thread was just gone. They also seem to have deleted their account, so I can’t even PM them. That’s all just a huge dick move.
Well OP. Looks like your post resulted in a moderator resigning and the appointment of two new moderators in this community. As I’ve said previously, it was a moderator removing posts for a very far stretch interpretation of Rule 3, and not users deleting them after getting the answer.
Let’s hope this results in a better community for the selfhosters here.
a moderator removing posts for a very far stretch interpretation of Rule 3
…stretch by which party? in the sense that the post not really about self-hosting (and OP tried to use rule 3 in a stretched interpretation), or that the post was about self-hosting but moderator applied it in unnecessarily strict way? The way you phrased it seems like the former, but then why would that result in moderator resigning?
(I’m not a native English speaker so sorry if it should have been clear.)
To give you some context, I initially made this comment on OP’s post. Then I followed up with this comment after the resignation of a moderator on [email protected].
I was referring to the former moderator’s very bizarre interpretation of Rule 3. You’ll see in the modlogs that many posts that were clearly about selfhosting getting removed under Rule 3.
Let’s hope this results in a better community for the selfhosters here.
Wow! I just noticed that. Shit moves quickly on the tubes. Welcome our new overlords!
Thank you for the update!
Oh my GOD that’s probably what happened to mine! I was discussing something on my last post and then suddenly the mod removed it because of “Rule 3”. Because we were talking about selfhosting. Which, all selfhosting is on our own hardware…, but I think my post leaned more hardware than the mod liked. Super annoying when you’re having a valid conversation, people are chiming in and helping, and then suddenly Removed: Arbitrary rule violation.
And I’ll use your comment as my post here for a local mod appointment of my lw account!
Hey, you made it!
As much as I hate to say itOP,v but when somebody ask a question they are asking for their own personal needs. And community is like this are actually here to serve an individuals questions. If that’s not the point of why you’re here then maybe what you should do is start a new thread world whatever it’s called here that’s called spell posted library or something like that so that way you can create a community fact sheet about how to do things. Why somebody delete stuff who knows people are weirdly private about openly public things. Maybe people feel embarrassed about asking your question or move it. It’s who the hell knows. But in the end it is their threat to ask questions and if you choose not to answer a question and then you don’t have to. However your time that you took to answer their question did not get wasted as they chose to take that advice and run with it. Just because your question now has to be read explain or your answer has to be reacclaimed in another thread doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t have to be explained in another thread anyways. You’re never going to point to this thread or that thread and say the answer was already here the answer was already there. That’s not how communities like this actually work.
Great suggestion. I think you’re both right - until we have such a library as you describe, we should try and keep this as a community resembling one. But a seperate resource actually designed for permanent knowledge hub would be more ideal.
You’re never going to point to this thread or that thread and say the answer was already here the answer was already there. That’s not how communities like this actually work.
This is (presumably) true. I guess another problem with people deleting their stuff is that it’s “bad etiquette” on the poster’s part, as it creates the illusion that less productive exchange is happening on this sub than really is, which then makes visitors less likely to ask for help here. And i guess the OP is hoping that people who need help will do a quick search before posting about their problem.
I did notice a post that was looking for help, then apparently labelled “solved”… then deleted for some reason. 😞
DenverCoder9 strikes again?
Was it this one?
Mod Removed Post Extending A LUKS Encrypted HDD To Utilize All Of The Drive (500 GB) [SOLVED] reason: Rule 3
Oh yes that was it!
So, mod removed. I feel less annoyed. 😄
Has that been happening a lot here?
Lemmy in general, yes. Here in self hosted at least a couple of times that I’ve seen. Including earlier today. But I don’t interact on every post.
I only find out because sometimes I like to go back to posts I comment on and see what additional information people have offered. (There’s always something to learn.) Then I find the post has been deleted.
I absolutely detest how on lemmy deleting a post also nukes access to the comments. They’re still there, but there’s no way in many normally lemmy UI to get to them.
That seems like a client-side UI issue though. I’m sure you could get that request into the dev roadmap of your preferred client.
Unfortunately it seems most major Lemmy clients (https://join-lemmy.org/apps) are small or individual projects, some of which are closed source or use their public repos just for transparency. Seems like a relatively easy feature to build though if the APIs still spit out all the required data after deletion.
Are you sure the post wasn’t modded? Those also show up as “deleted”.
Is there any way for a community to disallow post deletion? If not, this seems like a needed feature.
What if I accidentally posted to the wrong community? Or posted something with a username/password in it? Or accidentally selected a picture of my penis wearing a little monocle and top hat to this community?
maybe just edit it to omit those info? (we don’t preserve edit history right?)
Requesting mod action would probably work.
Unless there is no active mod.
or maybe a feature where posts cannot be deleted past a time period + amount of engagement.
Good point. If a post is two minutes old with no replies, may as will let folks change clean up their misclicks.
These would have to be added to Lemmy development, because currently I can delete a post of my own on a community on another instance and there isn’t a technical way to prevent it. Reporting and banning for behavior is tricky too unless you manage to remember the username of who posted it.
So, that’s an uphill battle at the development level and the moderation level.
I see now there were 3 posts removed in the past that all seen relevant to the community me. Going back I see ones I’ve read and interacted with.
Seems like it might be more mod actions to me, as others have pointed out. Maybe a more general self hosted community if the mod doesn’t want those sorts of (relevant to selfhosters but not specifically selfhost software announcements or whatever) posts here.
I think the mods/admins would have more accurate info on how often it’s happening.
It doesn’t make sense, either. There’s no rational reason to delete a thread after the question has been answered.
Even if it wasn’t actually a person but was an AI agent asking questions so it can scrape the data from the answers, there’s no real utility in deleting the posts after receiving responses. It just seems so weird.
Somebody pointed out that the person might be afraid they gave so much info that their post gets de-anonymized - but IMO people afraid of that shouldn’t post on public forums to begin with.
Could they be astroturfing, looking for a specific solution to fill search engines with their own product placement, then deleting because most of the comments are other FOSS solutions?
It might be to stop the damn notifications you keep getting whenever anyone posts to a thread you started. Also it’s reasonable to think discussion forums are in some sense ephemeral. If you want a persistent store of knowledge, try Wikipedia. Lemmy could also host wikis if it’s worthwhile, like reddit does.
I don’t think most people think of this to be ephemeral. First of all, this replaces reddit and we all know how valuable reddit was when searching for issues. Second of all, this is also kind of like forum, and not many people would think of a forum to be ephemeral. Not everything save-worthy has to be wikipedia kind of stuff.
I have no idea what you are using to browse Lemmy because the only notification I get is a number next to my profile icon in web browser or Thunder. And that’s often delayed by several days so I frequently look through my own old posts to find replies because don’t get reliable notifications.
Also it’s reasonable to think discussion forums are in some sense ephemeral
This is 100% wrong. This isn’t Discord or chat. People expect forums to appear in online search results, i.e. be persistent.
Uncheck “Send notifications to Email” in your settings. Or get a 3rd party app with a notifications setting.
If it’s easier to delete the post guess what people will do.
How is it easier to delete a post every time than to set preferences to not be emailed just once, then you never have to again?
How do I do that for just that post? And how do I ignore replies for that post so I didn’t get any other notices?
if you don’t want replies, just don’t post. everyone will be better off than if you are deleting posts. actually it’s the easiest thing to do.
that being said. are you guilty of deleting your posts after they had discussions? because if so, I’ll just block you because you are taking away value from the community, not adding to it
Why don’t you like getting replies? That’s the fun part!
Your comment isn’t popular, but we all know the rule: “the best thing needs to be the easy thing”, since people will often choose what’s easy and fast vs what’s ultimately better. We see this in security all the time (hello-oo NPM).
Do something once? Ew.
Do something infinitely? 🥵💦
sounds logical, the biggest logical, even
Ive never heard anything more logical in my life, and I am a cold unthinking machine running on pure logic
Checkmate
no. everything shpuld be petsisted, which is why i donate to the internet archive.
Even misinformation? CSAM?
i had to lookup what the acronym csam meant… c’mon - you know what i mean. i am talking about words, the context of the conversation. but to your first point, if a post had misinformation, backing that up so historians can see and have evidence of the behavior of this time. You can flag it but i think there is a lot of history that is washed away.
but no - i dont mean illegal pictures of children - this post was about deleting help posts.
Holy bad faith Batman.
Companies already do it with Reddit, so it’s not surprising, their error is to think that the niche open source federated alternative to reddit would make their bs work
It’s not that complicated. New user gets an answer, feels like the post isn’t relevant anymore, and deletes it without thinking.
Still a massive dick move, but still.
It is maybe weird but folks should be allowed to delete stuff again. There is no rule against it either. Make it one if it is something that the broader community doesn’t like.
It’s selfish. Dont post questions to a public forum if you don’t want them public. We’re a community, not a concierge service.
I am just sitting here laughing over the fact that this is the very reason people hated on reddit. When reddit wouldn’t allow people to remove their helpful posts when they left, and everyone was outraged. But since we are not reddit here, it is of course a wholly different thing.
Don’t worry, I see my opinion is unpopular, so this is the last I say on this.
On reddit if a post was deleted I could still interact with the thread, even if the content of the post itself was gone.
So it was a bit more elegant, imho, as it allows continued discussion and being able to link to the thread without it being completely nuked.
I also think that set expectations for how people expected it to work here, where the post contents and author would be nuked but the thread could still be accessed by hotlink.
They were spiting Reddit, trying to destroy it as a community on purpose. Reddit only tried to stop it because they stood to lose money; not becsuse they gave a fuck about the users. That’s why they were pissed.
I think the problem is not your opinion but the attitude.
I think its not about being allowed or not. Its about thinking before deleting if the action helps you in anyway and not doing it maybe helps many others.
Don’t make the post if you don’t want others to benefit from it.
PM a random person and bother them if you want to be selfish hoard the info for yourself. Don’t make a public post on a public messaging board if you don’t want that info to be public.
Anyone can delete their posts.
Problem is that if they ask questions, get resolutions and then nuke the post - resolution gets nuked too. That is how communities die. Firstly, no one will seek answers here because it is not here anymore. Secondly, users will spawn lots of posts with the same question since the answer got nuked, which will annoy prevalent users.
Wouldn’t it be more better if a question with an answer stays on the forum for everyone to see? Hasn’t it happened to you to find a post with an issue discussed that is similar to yours except there is no answer anymore since it got nuked and all it has is a post title?
I know I’ve seen
[removed]
[deleted]
too many times.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CF CloudFlare HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
[Thread #337 for this comm, first seen 4th Jun 2026, 18:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Bad bot.
The bot must be upvoting itself because yet again it listed a bunch of random abbreviations that aren’t in the thread at all.
Someone claimed it’s not ai slop but a bot with GitHub code but that code doesn’t produce this result.
It is suspicious that the bot “found” cloudflare without it being mentioned…
Remind me in the morning, I’ll take it down for investigation.
I haven’t seen the posts (probably from deletion) but Lemmy to me is an invaluable source of smart Linux and selfhosters. Seems like a great place to ask questions for problem to me on the surface. Where should people like me go to if I need help? Genuinely asking
The way I read it is it’s not the asking questions that is the problem at all, it’s the deleting afterwards.
Have you checked the modlogs to see if the posts you’re talking about were deleted by the mods? The mods here seem to really not want this community to be a support community and will delete it under Rule 3.
This is more likely the answer. I’ve seen multiple popular posts get deleted from here. I wish Lemmy did the soft delete method instead so that history is kept.
Realistically, a platform where you can delete your own questions so that they disappear for everyone isn’t the best platform for technical support communities. But a platform where you can’t delete your own posts is not the best platform for for a lot of other things, like privacy.
Two use cases without overlap seems like a good argument that there should be two different platforms.
Better than fucking Discord. I won’t even engage with a project that uses Discord as it’s support channel. Fuck that.
Fediverse is not private in any sense. Anything you post (or up/downvote) is blasted out to every federated instance and only gets deleted if that instance respects the delete command, which you cant rely on.
Too many people are ignorant of this.
I have a belief (not based in law, just my personal feeling) that once you post something in a conversation in a public forum, you no longer have any natural right to control it. By posting it in a conversation on the public internet, you have, in a practical sense, waved any right to control it. That is a part of a conversation that belongs to the public, and you gave your comment away freely. It is public record. You cannot demand that it be forgotten or erased any more than I can demand that something I said to my friends yesterday be forgotten and erased.
If I hosted a forum, I would make it clear that this is the policy, and I would not allow people to delete comments that they posted. Edits would be allowed, but the history would be available. Deletions would only ever happen if I was legally compelled.
This all gets complicated if someone posts private information about a third party. I would rapidly delete such posts and ban such users. The third party never consented to anything, so it’s not the same.
Fully agree. I wish people hadn’t started using their real names on the internet, it’s made privacy so much more of a concern than it had any reason to be in the age of @GoombaStomp69.
this really sucks. can’t they just lock comments or something
Sometimes I assume the mods delete them because no one answered
oh shit son, you running this show too? Nice work trying to keep people in line and keeping the knowledge around, and again, great work on your light touch moderation on YSK, you’re doing great.
What
I imagine this is a controversial opinion…but isn’t the idiomatic solution to this to either:
petition the mods to get this rule added and enforced
or
To start a community that enforces this rule and let it compete with this one.
Isn’t that the whole idea of federation?
It absolutely is. Another benefit of federation is that it means we can report OP to our own instances to free their feeds of what I call “whining slop”.
petition the mods to get this rule added and enforced
I’m keen to know how that would be written much less enforced. # deletes and you’re out? That’s a lot to keep up with unless there were some automated way of doing that.
I wasnt suggesting it would be easy, in fact i think it would be rather difficult on both fronts.
My comment was more about the method by which this kind of this was intended to be addressed.
I believe forking doesn’t work because of network effects - Wikipedia.
