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.
Sure it’s not also mods removing them?
that’s a lot of rule 3
Looks like it’s hybridsarcasims favorite rule
Wow crazy I couldn’t imagine that this community gets enough posts to warrant so aggressively enforcing rules about the content.
Some people think that keeping a community laser focused attracts more readers through quality. It’s an ideal that I respect, but I’ve never really observed that to be true in reality.
If you’re reading this @HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz consider this my polite feedback that I completely get what you’re trying to accomplish but you might be working harder than you need to be.
Congrats. You’re a mod now. Have at it.
Lmao I guess I should start by reading the community rules.
Exactly, I could understand it on the huge subreddits with one question per minute, but here is so silent…
Plus, as a user, when a mod deletes a post that I took over ten minutes to write, I go “fuck It” and stop contributing altogether (this also includes replying to other posts)
Wow a lot of those mod-deleted posts were very interesting for me
https://lemmy.world/post/39025760
wtf? Half the post is nuked even after being locked. I don’t even see how such a small community can be so stuck up about relevancy and purity washing selfhosted as if we all own our own DNS registrars and can do outbound SMTP.
I assume they did not read the post very clearly.
It’s a major pet peeve of mind when places get overly zealous about moderating what is on or off topic when the volume of posts doesn’t warrant it. Especially when there has already been some discussion on the posts.

Had that same thing happen to me recently too
Mod had deleted my posts that I feel were relevant as not relevant.
Just glanced at it, but noticed a user (ayyy) was temp banned here 24 days ago for apparently telling a user to kys, then appointed mod here 45 minutes ago.
Wat?
Looked like admins did it so could have been anywhere.
I don’t get it why would selfhosting-related hardware questions be irrelevant? If we are talking about 14tb drives having weird behaviour, I’d say this is the right place to ask.
People do that? That’s fucked up…
What the hell is the purpose?
I think some people are being a bit of privacy freaks, so they don’t want to leave their data online. I still think its stupid tho cuz Ive posted questions, get a good response but forget after a while. Then when I do go back to remind myself, its deleted.
It’s probably that. I get it. But it still undermines the good will of the community. I’m tempted to delete my original comment for the gag.
They’re not doing this
Wondering the same thing, maybe they think the information about their private server and network setups will be used against them?
I think I should start checking if a poster has a history of regularly deleting posts/comments, before trying to give a useful answer.
No, they don’t.
we need to make a list of usernames who are deleting their posts, regularly or even just twice
Yeah it’s more than likely the same people doing it all the time.
Edit: either that or AI bots farming information from Lemmy to feed their databases.
None of that happened
Could this be like the BS we were seeing earlier in the year on one of the meme comms (I think) where users would post something, then delete their account afterwards, nuking the whole thread.
could be, I think when deleting your account there is a checkbox whether to delete all your posts abd comments
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.
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.
this really sucks. can’t they just lock comments or something
I don’t get it. why are they deleting their posts?
I don’t get it either, but it was also a big problem on Reddit for years.
On Reddit especially, it usually was people asking a question, then having their alt account respond with whatever they were trying to shill, and just doing that over and over again.
It’s just another type of advertising to them. Ask a question trying to solve a problem, then use your alt account to shill your own solution.
Because the moderators will ban them if they don’t.
Can you expand on this? Why do you think this?
Hadn’t noticed, but wow. I wonder what the motivation is to delete info that would help other people.
“fuck you got mine”
There are a couple of accounts who were doing this regularly for some reason on all sorts of different topics. But I would need to see more evidence of this happening. As someone else mentioned it could be mods or a couple rare cases or all sorts of things.
Lately in all of the lemmys like each time I go to look at my replies (if I ever get one), the reply, my comment, and the thread are all gone. I’m often thinking it’s mods just nuking threads because of inflammation or whatever.
Weird, I see that pretty rarely and is usually because the post broke some rule (offtopic, duplicate, etc)
Maybe I’m just attracted to rule breaker threads. <3
Not so much in this Lemmy, other ones really.
I don’t get it – if something’s not like offensive but just irrelevant why not let downvotes bury it rather than delete it?
I wonder if someone is trying out an AI or something and seeing the results. Then deleting. More evidence will pop up eventually.
My guess was that it’s users who fundamentally misunderstand federation, and think that deleting their comments will prevent them from being scraped or used to ID them later. In reality, if someone was truly concerned about avoiding doxxing, they’d just switch accounts. Because anyone can spin up a single-user instance, federate to scrape content from all the communities they want, and then simply refuse to respect delete requests.
Because when you delete something on a Lemmy instance, the instance simply sends a delete request to all the other instances that federated with it. But those other instances can easily ignore the delete request and retain the deleted content for as long as they want.
That’s also part of why it’s so stupid that AI crawlers are scraping Lemmy and thrashing instance owners’ rate limits. The AI crawler could just set up a new instance and automatically gather the content via federation. But instead, they just send crawler bots. Because fuck the instance owners, I got my content either way and using a crawler bot didn’t require me to learn how federation works.
I’ve never understood why the OP can nuke an entire thread full of comments. Not even reddit is that obtuse.
They didn’t
It happens on reddit all the time as well
No it doesn’t. If someone on Reddit deletes there post, the comments are all still visible.
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.
Thank you for the update!
And I’ll use your comment as my post here for a local mod appointment of my lw account!
Hey, you made it!
Yep! And got all the old reports cleaned up to boot
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!
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 !selfhosted@lemmy.world.
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.
This is the same thing as posting on a forum a question, then saying never mind I figured it out WITHOUT STATING THE ANSWER! When googling shit and coming across this back in the day I would get more mad at those than my issue.
That’s even more infuriating than when you used Google to find a thread where someone asks the exact question you have, and there is only one response and it’s someone saying “use Google”.
“use Google”.
It makes me cringe when I see it in a forum. *Imagine you come to a forum designed to help people do <Topic x>, you ask a question, and the response is 'Google exists. Piss off."
The spiritual heir to ‘RTFM’
I’ve lost count of the snarky ‘let me google that for you’ links I’ve found doing niche searches in the pre-AI days.
Especially when it builds you up over multiple posts that make it sound more and more like your exact problem.
Op pls delete this post
mods please. it is giving me gas.
Yes! This drives me crazy. I will sometimes go back and edit posts to add more info months later.
We have all been in a situation where we are looking for a very specific answer, and the answer only exists in one obscure forum from a decade ago that has the exact info we are looking for.
It’s hard enough to ensure lemmy’s long-term fidelity without people axing their own content.
Quote ppl you answer.
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
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
I haven’t noticed many posts deleted by the user themselves. I see a lot of ‘deleted by user’ comments. I try to remember to put [SOLVED] on any serious post I make, after the fact. That way, someone searching can cross-moginate whatever their issues are with what solved the issue for me. Maybe the user deleting the post once it was solved is embarrassed they asked a supposedly ‘stupid’ question?
I try to remember to put [SOLVED] on any serious post I make, after the fact.
You (and folks who do the same) are unsung heroes. Thank you.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m a hero. It just seems a ‘thank you’ and a [SOLVED] would be a common courtesy, especially if someone took the time, and had the patience to muck through my feeble brain to tweeze out exactly what the issue was. LOL
Oh, I thought this was about me since I just asked for file transfer stuff but you’re specifically talking about deleting it right after. It happened to me on asklemmy where the user deleted it right after
Asking questions in a public forum (after searching imo) is generally a positive thing. Answers are then public and the next person with the question can find the answer. That sort of behaviour should be encouraged, and no one will ever complain about it imo.
It was a mod
dick move.
Which users are doing that so I can block them?
Pretty sure lots of the “deleted” posts were actually removed by the mods. Rule 3 seems to be a popular justification for post removal in this community, and it basically outlaws all of the “my server is having this issue, anyone got any ideas” types of posts that OP has cited.
While I agree it’s popular for removing posts, maybe it shouldn’t be. If we want users to organically find Lemmy, one of the best ways to do that is the same way users end up at Reddit: By googling an error code, and finding a five year old “Edit: I figured it out. Here is what I did” post.
Or maybe we just need to make (and properly support) a community that is dedicated to those kinds of posts. If a “my server is broken plz help” post isn’t relevant to /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world, maybe we need to make a /c/SelfHostedSupport to redirect the Rule 3 posts to.


















