I think it’s worth talking about as it seems to be very poir and it’s a major problem towards adoption, one of the several. I have a tendency to occasionally go through my post history to try and remember things I had forgotten about. Go look and see how the conversation may have changed since I last looked and stuff like that when I’m just sitting around bored.
What I have noticed with Lemmy is that way too many posts no longer exist, I’m getting really tired of being able to see something in my post history but then when I try to go to it having it be unable to be loaded and it no longer is around. Most of these threads are not even that old it seems to constantly happen, stuff that’s barely even a month back doesn’t exist anymore let alone the things that are further back.
Meanwhile on Reddit I can still go to threads from like almost 10 years ago and as long as they didn’t get hit by that phase where people went deleting their entire Post history everything is still there. I think the longevity of content is a pretty major issue. I’m not really sure what is causing it, if moderators are just randomly deleting threads, if people are randomly deleting their own stuff or if some instances have retention issues and delete older stuff.
Curious what others think about this, have you been running into it as well? Do you see it as a problem? Why or why not Etc
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
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.
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 think this the main disadvantage of the threadiverse, probably because I still don’t fully understand how it works.
Where is each post hosted? What is each instance hosting? Do they keep copies of stuff from other instances? How expensive is all that?Longevity costs 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.
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.
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.
Very little on here or reddit is worth preserving IMO. Sure, there are some gems in the mountains of shit. But those are mostly the “technical answers to technical questions” variety.
(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.
No worse than Reddit
