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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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.
Just go ask an LLM first (ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Mistral/yourselfhostedllm). If it doesn’t know, then come ask here.
Please don’t encourage use of misinformation tools
it never does. never had, never will.
Criticise llm all you want but it’s successfully walked me through some really technical things that I had no idea how to do.
The funny thing Is someone answering the question is probably using a llm.
I did notice a post that was looking for help, then apparently labelled “solved”… then deleted for some reason. 😞
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. 😄
DenverCoder9 strikes again?
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 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.
Huh. That’s a smart idea (AI federated instance). I imagine Lemmy is too small for it to be on Big AIs radar very much (just yet)
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.
I really don’t understand these people. If you don’t want to be doxxed or scraped, stop participating online. It’s that simple. Even if you participate in a private sub, it will eventually get scrapped.
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.
Does deleting the root post nuke the whole thread?
I dont think so. So quoting the original post would be an effective solution.
The post yes, the comments no. You can’t view the post any more. Here’s one that was removed by the mod, but the effect is the same: https://lemmy.zip/post/65524914
Comments on a post still exist in that user’s history, and you can see those, but you can’t see them in context.
Who’s downvoting this?? Ban those moronic leeches. They’re either anti-community or have the reading comprehension of a potato, ffs.
I suspect people who realized it was the former moderator removing the posts, and not the users themselves.
We don’t need to be unpleasant to disagreethough, so going forward lets try to avoid that.
Eh… IMO there’s a big difference between disagreeing about something reasonable, and disagreeing about the most basic tenets of what makes a community a community.
Kinda’ just making room for the sort of hypocritical ilk that ruin so many things. I can think of so many political and religious examples these days but I’ll refrain from fully describing such depressing things.
I’d re-read what I said then - again, it was not users deleting their content, but the former moderator. People downvoting were likely responding to the blame being placed on the users - aka, the members of this community - when they were not to blame. The people you just referred to as moronic leeches with the reading comprehension of a potato who were, again, not to blame.
Who is downvoting a post based on what’s not in the post title or body? Besides, there are far more downvotes now than when I made my original comment, so it’s clearly not people being fooled by previous, now removed comments.
Also, I said or. It’s Either they’re against a community of answering questions openly, or have the reading comprehension of a potato…
Whats in the post title is blaming users. Its incorrect.
I’d recommend you reconsider who needs to work on their reading comprehension, as well as the attitude coming in here. This is a community, and one where we don’t need to come in and attack/name call, especially when you’ve fundamentally misunderstood the issue.
lol I’ve understood the issue. The original post is not exactly nuanced. I’m sorry you feel so offended by my opinion that people who do not understand what a community of questions and answers should look like should not be welcome to people who understand what publicly answered questions should look like, but you do you.
Holy stackoverflow effect batman!
I’ve made a couple of posts here and there to get some answers on how to do certain things, as I’m really new to this whole self-hosting thing. But after some time my thread gets auto-deleted, often before I can even get a solid answer to my question.
So, if /c/SelfHosted isn’t where I should post beginner questions for the community to help me, where should I post? The sidebar provides no link to something like that.
Quote ppl you answer.
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
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
I have mixed feelings on post deletion. On the one hand, historical technical forum conversations are an incredibly valuable resource, and /c/selfhosted is a technical community. The value comes from having a history in context, and deleting part of the context damages the whole and makes the whole corpus less useful overall. It also allows incorrect or outdated information to fester when there isn’t a strong historical context that can be referenced.
On the other hand, people are right to be concerned about leaving large tracts of text available on the open internet, where it can be scraped, profiled, and possibly de-anonymized. I am very sympathetic to those who delete out of concerns for their own privacy, and I don’t know what a good solution is.
Maybe a compromise would be (on user “delete”) to leave the contents of a post intact, but simply delete the username from the post, and the post from the user’s history? Deletion on the fediverse is a bit of a sham anyway, and it would leave valuable discussions intact for other users.
I think a good solution would be to create a community specifically to connect people who don’t want to share their posts with people willing to provide individual help. They could find each other and DM a conversation. Milking a public forum for advice and then vandalizing it by deleting the post is definitely NOT a good solution, and I do not share your sympathy for people who do that. It’s like curtaining off a few back rows of a bus to use all day as an office - although that could have been funny in a Seinfeld episode.
There are good reasons for hiding a paper trail. Specifically in a self-hosting community, I understand operators wanting to hide their particular technical details from those who would wish to target them. This can be government agencies who like to arrest or kill dissidents, or freelance assholes who just like to attack queer infra where they can. I don’t think deleting posts is particularly effective, and the privacy concerns would be better addressed with a safe alt or a burner account, but I get why some people do it. Privacy is hard and when the stakes are high, people tend to over-secure rather than risk under-securing.
It’s always standard OPSEC to anonymize/obfuscate your infra details.
If they are really concerned about privacy, host a local LLM and query it. You’ll get a subservient AI which doesn’t argue with you about data permanence, and all your data stays inhouse. Stop participating in public forums.
That would be any freelancing hiring platform.
I spent many years as a software dev contractor working through agencies, but I still don’t see the parallel.
I mean if you want personal, private, ad-hoc support, hire someone to work for you personally.
And yet free opensource software exists. Lots of knowledgeable people are happy to help others during their free time.
It’s me, I’m people
If people want to ask something that they don’t want tied to them, they should use a throwaway account. Scrapers will probably grab the text quickly (especially if they’re using ActivityPub) so it’s a false sense of security to do it days later.
If you post something to a federated platform, it is literally never deleted. There is no privacy to be gained from deleting posts from the fediverse.
Sure it’s not also mods removing them?
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.
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.
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)
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.
@HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world Just to add, I would say working to the detriment of the community through the deletions.
Locking would make more sense, along with redirecting to specific communities that you feel would be more relevant.
As I see it, I think people post here for what could be considered tangential because it is more popular than similar communities. I think this very post shows that the users have been perfectly fine with the posts being made, and are bothered by the information (effectively) disappearing with deletions.
If the mod team does not want those sort of posts here, of course thats fine. But it is kind of shitty to delete them, especially with so much interaction already there. I’d encourage locking them and redirecting through a mod comment instead. If you can’t think of a more appropriate community for them, its likely they can’t either, which is why they posted here in the first place.
Just my 2¢.
Congrats. You’re a mod now. Have at it.
Considering your application of the rules, I really dont think thats what you want. Unless you want me to go ahead and restore posts that (like other users per this thread) seem relevant enough to be here.
Quite a response to “here’s a way this could work better for everyone”, too.
But if its what you want, sure, I’ll do it.
Congrats. You’re a mod now. Have at it.
Lmao I guess I should start by reading the community rules.
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.
Mod had deleted my posts that I feel were relevant as not relevant.
Wow a lot of those mod-deleted posts were very interesting for me
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
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?
Not seen that on Lemmy, but it’s definitely been a problem on reddit for years. Agree with you - the questions and answers (and even the wrong answers) are valuable to anyone else searching for the same issue. “I got my answer, now fuck y’all”
