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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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!
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!
Yep! And got all the old reports cleaned up to boot
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.)
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!
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.
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.
no. everything shpuld be petsisted, which is why i donate to the internet archive.
Even misinformation? CSAM?
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.
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’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.
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”.
I mean; the mechanics ensure that it kinda is. Are these good mechanics?
This is a major ‘upside’ to centrally controlled spaces, they are tricky to exploit in several ways. I don’t think that maintaining a open community with both:
- Easy exploits;
- Social norms against using them;
is effective.
Either the exploitation is a feature that we accept, or we should rework the feature. Behavior is downstream of systems. How should we change the delete-post system?
I just want to apologize for being the person who asks questions and then doesn’t respond to the comments. I get overwhelmed D: but I’d never delete my post, what’s the purpose in that?
Someone may have the same question in the future and there will be answers. You not responding is not that bad but it is even better that you do and provide an update to your situation, if you wish.
Editing original post and including steps which helped would be great. I don’t expect anyone to reply to each an every comment separately, but a summary on what caused the problem and what fixed it would be nice. Specially when someone later finds the post with similar issue.
or at least change the title to [solved] with a link to the comment that worked.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CSAM Child Sexual Abuse Material DNS Domain Name Service/System SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol VPN Virtual Private Network
[Thread #0 for this comm, first seen 5th Jun 2026, 05:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Hadn’t noticed, but wow. I wonder what the motivation is to delete info that would help other people.
“fuck you got mine”
Does deleting the root post nuke the whole thread?
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.
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.
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?
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 and 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.
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.
Its also entirely wrong, as I’ve noted to you now many times.
I’m also letting you know politely that coming in with an attitude like that will not be accepted here.
I replied to you because your comment was reported for rule #1. Just because the last mod was lax with managing comments and overzealous with their interpretation of rule #3 doesn’t mean I will be.
To put it bluntly - be civil or don’t be here.
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.
Edit: I don’t want to make new replies so I am just editing this in here. I did not say I am ok with people deleting their posts. I found it idiotic when this was done on reddit, and it isn’t much better here. But the option is there, so people will use it. Make it a rule it shouldn’t be done or move to a platform where it isn’t possible, what else do you think you can do about this?
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.
I think the problem is not your opinion but the attitude.
People do that? That’s fucked up…
What the hell is the purpose?
They’re not doing this
