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?
The internet is made of light.
Before reddit were forums on every subject.(rip digg. in a deep diggy hole.)
It was a vastly efficient highpoint in crowdsourcing general solutions. Searchable, peer-review intensive. Tom’s Hardware is still around, and a lot of FLOSS have forums yet…
but yah. stuff with big CEOs who are adding big paywalls to their privacy-suckers like reddit and discord.
I just did some analysis.
3.3% of posts in the last week have been deleted (1.7% of comments).
Where are these stats from? Like what communities/instances/filtering options?
I ask because it feels like a lot more than that is filtered everytime I go through to look at my comment history/click through to posts.
No filtering, just all posts in the last week. It’s probably higher in some communities than others, yep!
Of these, I must ask:
What percentage were by new accounts?
And what percentage were removed vs. deleted by the user?
If you can isolate that
Yes to the first but no to the second. Anyway the point is the ephemeral feeling is probably not so much because of the deletion (as it’s quite rare) and more to do with a lack of date filters on the search.
In PieFed you can set the search to order by recent instead of relevance which sometimes helps but being able to specify a date range while still sorting by relevance would be nice. I’ll add it to codeberg.
There was a wave of bots posting maniacally and then deleting the entire account within a day. (Still might be going on, but it seems less frequent than it was.)
I have no idea what they’re trying to accomplish by doing that, but anyone who joined around that time would probably feel the same way as you.
Not just bots tho. There are some real users that are just paranoid. Go back to any old asklemmy or NSQ question and you see the (-5) in comments, people run scripts to delete old comments. It’s the norm here.
I don’t blame them tho. If its like older than 7 days, and you haven’t saved the info, I’d say it’s fair game for the original user to delete it.
I just saw an entire train of spam from a commenter that appears to be dealing with … a lot. I’m not naming names, but suffice to say there are definitely some folks dealing with mental issues posting the way being described here.
Still, that isn’t the norm. It probably just feels like more because this is such a small space - when there aren’t hundreds of comments (like found on more popular social media sites), a few spam posts can feel like a lot.
Maybe it’s because I like to focus on the positives, I still think there’s more quality content here (by percentage of overall comments) than on many other sites. There’s a lot more thoughtfulness, and more people resolving disagreements by actually listening to each other and seeing each other’s sides. I’ve been reading Lemmy since leaving Reddit during the API debacle, and I’ve noticed I feel much better about engaging in the community here than I ever did there. I’ve seen countless Reddit arguments that hinge on one (or more) stubborn parties refusing to take in new information. I used to feel dread when I saw messages in my inbox, because no matter how carefully you tried to word your thoughts, there would invariably be some troll intent on misunderstanding your comment at all costs. It was exhausting and discouraging.
I realized recently that I no longer feel that way when I get a response on Lemmy. I mean, I still approach clicking that box with a tiny bit of trepidation, but the more I click it, the more I see rational responses, funny commentary, and simply friendly people responding in light conversation. There are trolls out there, but I’ve come back to see responses already deleted by mods, and other commenters defending my position, all without me knowing what the troll even said. Despite all Lemmy’s flaws, there are a lot of decent people here, and it seems we look out for each other.
We must continue to practice this rationality and kindness, and encourage new-comers to leave their Reddit life at the door. If we want Lemmy to be better, then it’s on us, its users, to build and maintain the culture we want it to have.
For me, I like the peace. Pass it on ✌️
When you can be easily fingerprinted with only a few comments I can understand the paranoid ones.
But I needy community.
I’ve only lemmied for a few months (technically I had some account very long ago but didn’t really use it and forgot about it as everything was dead). I doubt I ran into that, and I think a lot of it is just moderators removing things, and that being far worse than when it happens on reddit because none of the comments are retained nor their structure.
If you run your own instance of Lemmy, you still can view all deleted and removed posts.
I do think there are still edge cases that break that, and it definitely is not a practical solution in terms of adoption or solving the community problems I feel like this must cause, but it would work in terms of personally having a workaround I suppose. At that point, you’re just kinda running it for the sake of archiving though.
Well, removed yes. Deleted, not always.
It’s also almost impossible to search Lemmy. Good luck trying to find a post from a couple months ago if you haven’t saved it or commented on it. Even if it hasn’t been deleted, it’s almost impossible to find it again.
Absolutely. One of the things that made reddit a pseudo-default of the internet was the ability to find relatively niche information long after. Here, its quite the struggle and I’m not sure search engines play nice with lemmy.
Like maybe there should be some purposefully searchable instances with access to as much as possible for that purpose as a solution but yeah, its very rough.
I don’t use Lemmy, what’s the issue with search on it? I don’t see any obvious issues with the one on your instance at a glance.
Depending on the instance/software on the fediverse, there are scripts that get rid of old content or do not go over a certain amount of data.
Its both security and practicality. Most of us are on tiny instances all over the place. Peoples houses, in small containers in the cloud, that sort of thing. We have limited space that is (probably) not be monetized in any way. This is all a labor of love. Im not saying its all like this or even specific to lemmy, but we are much smaller than the big wigs on the internet.
Everything is Ephemeral. We just help it along a bit and make it work for us.
Its both security and practicality.
I would certainly strongly disagree with any idea that this help security outside of security theatre. This is after all, a public forum.
Practicality wise, I doubt this is the reason it feels so ephemeral, because I feel like most of the removals I’ve run into were for relatively recent content, and likely mod removals (you’d never know though…)
Because it is. I understand the want for privacy and such, but it still sucks to have a prolonged topic, just to have the OP nuke the parent post which deletes the entire comment tree. I have communities that I have blocked or unfollowed because a good chunk of their posts just get deleted a few days after posting. It makes it hard to want to contribute to the communities due to it.
I’ve been getting back into screenshots with the fediverse. It’s more like a meadow than a cheese cooler.
I would use reddit for crowd-sourced hobby advice. If someone gave bad advice, most subs had plenty of other members who would quickly correct them and explain or even provide sources.
Outside of Linux and a few other techy things, Lemmy doesn’t have enough members experienced in hobbies that interest me to be able to rely on the community correcting itself.
So I often see, eg, Bob from ABC community says something, but it sounds a little off to me. I don’t know enough to say if Bob is right or wrong, and no one is chiming in with better advice. So it’s a mostly worthless interaction.
Reddit used to be a great repository of human information sharing. The first place I used to go to search a decade ago was Reddit. Reviews for the best product or how to fix a problem, someone in Reddit would have answered at some point.
Lemmy isn’t searchable reliably. The platform is purposely fragmented (which gaming community was that posted in? Never to be found again). The userbase here is small anyway so the breadth of content is far more limited. Things worth saving better be bookmarked and possibly saved as a copy, because it will never be found again. Niche interests and edge case problems don’t get covered. It’s mostly broad interest entertainment content here, and so memes are the only thing I come here for now.
similar stuff, impossible to reliably search and so many things gone after a while. i’m even thinking of setting up a personal instance and having it ignore post removal requests…
This appears to be one of the only bandaid solutions (as another user has recommended). It’s an awful lot of work for a fundemental platform flaw though. I suppose the flaw is a bit more nuanced than any one issue though.
I imagine simply not removing comments with a post being removed/user being deleted would be a huge step up for usability however, but then as far as I gather, lemmy has a somewhat antagonistic relationship with the lead dev?? I remember some folks talking about an alternative being developed using a compatible protocol but it being early along. I guess we’ll see if there is enough oomph for that to come to fruition.
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.
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.
this experience feel temporary and kind of throwaway.
See a number in my nickname? I have started with 0001. Banned here, server shut down there, some other problems… New account.
Yes, everything is temporary here. Search engines go crazy over the overall decentralized idea of Lemmy, so they mostly don’t index it. Just write whatever you want, and move on.I admire your optimism using four digits.
I dare you to make the numbers hexadecimal.All fun and games until Lembot_0009 is replaced by Lembot_000A.
My main issue with lemmy is that the feed is just random bullshit 100% of the time. Why even bother allowing me to “Join” communities if it doesn’t increase the odds of them showing up in my feed?
Stop using All as your front page…
Doesn’t matter whether I go to all or home. It looks exactly the same and never shows posts from communities I subscribed to.
Edit: Been using Lemmy for almost a year and just realized this :\
Subscribed should be the default, like in PieFed.
There’s a bit in the settings where you can pick which one you want to show on your home page too.
Natural consequence of decentralised hosting
Natural consequence of offended mods deleting discussion they don’t like
Natural consequence of offended admins defederating
Someone deleted a comment right after I responded to it earlier today and I keep womdering if it was even done on purpose. They didn’t say anything out of place, and I was just continuing the conversation we already were having, so I wouldn’t think they were embarassed or something. Like, maybe they don’t even know it was deleted because… Why delete it? 🤷♂️
