Posts on Lemmy feel very ephemeral to me.
It feels like so many posts end up deleted, and then unlike the obvious main alternative reddit, all of the comments, the history of those comments, their trees, and the discussions that were had along the way are gone too.
You could want to recall what someone said a week later, if they for instance, linked to something interesting, or you found more information on a topic or you simply came back late to their response, and you get nothing. No idea what happened, no information about said post, and that’s it.
It feels like this happens to a very far from insignificant amount of posts and it is just one part of why Lemmy feels so short-lived/temporary/ephemeral to me.
Posts being removed means so much more, user profiles are difficult to navigate and unsearchable, there are no accumulated values publicly available, bans don’t have appeals, communities don’t have moderator chats, mod logs only semi work and can be circumvented (eliminating the point of having them), server up-time is a bit shaky, drama means things sometimes break with inter server communication and more.
These all feel fixable, but it just feels like a large number of things conspire to make this experience feel temporary and kind of throwaway.
I just thought, surely other people feel similarly so I pose this question to see what other people think about it.
Why does Lemmy feel ephemeral to you?
When people delete their account or when they are banned by their home instance, all their comments are deleted as well.
That seems like an incredibly awful design decision, particularly given that post deletions delete tons of content from other people as well.
It would be one thing if there were a separate utility to fight cases of spam (where one might want to automate removing spam posts), but just doing basically that, but by default seems mildly insane to me.
This also makes controversial political discourse impossible. Whole threads are easily nuked because of one spicy comment.
It makes Lemmy a worse echo chamber than Reddit on political topics.
Some instance operators do this; but it is still done manually. It’s not a feature of Lemmy.
I don’t think that’s true? I’ve seen instance-banned accounts that do not have content purged.
Not sure from the banning perspective, but when deleting an account, there’s a toggle for whether or not you want to delete your posts and comments along with it.
Yes, that’s true. But what I meant is that you don’t have to purge it.