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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On reddit they had bots that would automatically repost the content of the post so it couldn’t be deleted.
People do that? That’s fucked up…
I think I should start checking if a poster has a history of regularly deleting posts/comments, before trying to give a useful answer.
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.
Wondering the same thing, maybe they think the information about their private server and network setups will be used against them?
No, they don’t.
It sticks around in other software just FYI. Maybe lemmy should have something that admins can do? Maybe something super admins can re-instate if a mod states should be un-deleted? I dunno.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Came across that so many fucking times that it’s burned into my psyche. I will go out of my way to list the answer, especially now google is a wet pile of shit technically
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.
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”
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?
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.
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”.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Has that been happening a lot here?
I think the mods/admins would have more accurate info on how often it’s happening.
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.
Are you sure the post wasn’t modded? Those also show up as “deleted”.
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 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.
Is there any way for a community to disallow post deletion? If not, this seems like a needed feature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
Bad bot.
