I’m getting annoyed with people that ask a question, have the community answer their question and troubleshoot over several days, only to delete their post and the solution.

The person asking the question is often providing the least amount of effort, so why should they have exclusive right to delete the contributions of others?

Possible fix: have a per-community option to only request deletion.

  • pomegranatefern@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    6 days ago

    I was there for that, yeah. It did occur to me that this might be a similar case, but either way, I think the solution to deleted posts like this should be that you can still view the comments by going to the link directly or clicking to it from a comment on a user profile.

    While I understand that it’s hard to recall an arrow that’s been let fly into the public forum of the Fediverse, I don’t love the idea of automatically saving everything, either. I want for people to be able to self-delete content, and also there’s concerns of doxxing and illegal content. I just don’t think that deleting a post should make the comment section disappear into the aether.

    My ideal scenario here would be:

    • Self-deleting a post will remove the post content and remove the post from the community where it’s posted, but the comments remain viewable by going to the post link or a comment directly.
    • Moderators have the option to delete a post vs. to unlist a post from the community. So illegal content could be deleted, but off-topic content would leave the post’s text intact, just prevent it from showing in the community feed. Unlisted posts could also still be re-shared to more appropriate comms.
    • Users would have the ability to mute notifications on a post, removing motivation to delete posts just to get rid of notifications.
    • Users would have have the ability to orphan a post, removing its association with their user but keeping the post otherwise intact, for people who want to leave a post available for archival purposes but no longer want their name on it.

    Of course, I list these as ideals because I realize there’s potentially tricky implementation issues. I’ve never really dug into the codebase, so IDK if some of this is stuff that would require updates to the Fediverse protocol itself to be supported, if some of it would be tricky or a heavy lift on Lemmy and Piefed, how difficult it would be to update viewing apps like Voyager and Jerboa and the like, etc. And there are of course also UX considerations in terms of how to make any of this intuitive to site users. But it does feel to me like the ideal balance of users having the ability to remove their own content vs. people wanting to retain access to their own content and to useful references even when a post is removed vs. moderator ability to curate and moderate communities.