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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I haven’t noticed many posts deleted by the user themselves. I see a lot of ‘deleted by user’ comments. I try to remember to put [SOLVED] on any serious post I make, after the fact. That way, someone searching can cross-moginate whatever their issues are with what solved the issue for me. Maybe the user deleting the post once it was solved is embarrassed they asked a supposedly ‘stupid’ question?
I try to remember to put [SOLVED] on any serious post I make, after the fact.
You (and folks who do the same) are unsung heroes. Thank you.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m a hero. It just seems a ‘thank you’ and a [SOLVED] would be a common courtesy, especially if someone took the time, and had the patience to muck through my feeble brain to tweeze out exactly what the issue was. LOL
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.
dick move.
Which users are doing that so I can block them?
Pretty sure lots of the “deleted” posts were actually removed by the mods. Rule 3 seems to be a popular justification for post removal in this community, and it basically outlaws all of the “my server is having this issue, anyone got any ideas” types of posts that OP has cited.
While I agree it’s popular for removing posts, maybe it shouldn’t be. If we want users to organically find Lemmy, one of the best ways to do that is the same way users end up at Reddit: By googling an error code, and finding a five year old “Edit: I figured it out. Here is what I did” post.
Or maybe we just need to make (and properly support) a community that is dedicated to those kinds of posts. If a “my server is broken plz help” post isn’t relevant to /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world, maybe we need to make a /c/SelfHostedSupport to redirect the Rule 3 posts to.
Yeah I think this is a tool worth having for mods. Maybe going through deleted posys and seeing who are repeat offenders.
To me, that isn’t building a community, that’s extracting from one. It’s no better than AI scraping. You got your answer and then keep it for yourself.
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.
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.
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.
I think the problem is not your opinion but the attitude.
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.
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.
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.
we need to make a list of usernames who are deleting their posts, regularly or even just twice
Yeah it’s more than likely the same people doing it all the time.
Edit: either that or AI bots farming information from Lemmy to feed their databases.
None of that happened
Could this be like the BS we were seeing earlier in the year on one of the meme comms (I think) where users would post something, then delete their account afterwards, nuking the whole thread.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
[Thread #0 for this comm, first seen 5th Jun 2026, 05:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Bruh
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.
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.
Somebody pointed out that the person might be afraid they gave so much info that their post gets de-anonymized - but IMO people afraid of that shouldn’t post on public forums to begin with.
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.
Also it’s reasonable to think discussion forums are in some sense ephemeral
This is 100% wrong. This isn’t Discord or chat. People expect forums to appear in online search results, i.e. be persistent.
I have no idea what you are using to browse Lemmy because the only notification I get is a number next to my profile icon in web browser or Thunder. And that’s often delayed by several days so I frequently look through my own old posts to find replies because don’t get reliable notifications.
no. everything shpuld be petsisted, which is why i donate to the internet archive.
Even misinformation? CSAM?
i had to lookup what the acronym csam meant… c’mon - you know what i mean. i am talking about words, the context of the conversation. but to your first point, if a post had misinformation, backing that up so historians can see and have evidence of the behavior of this time. You can flag it but i think there is a lot of history that is washed away.
but no - i dont mean illegal pictures of children - this post was about deleting help posts.
Holy bad faith Batman.
I don’t think most people think of this to be ephemeral. First of all, this replaces reddit and we all know how valuable reddit was when searching for issues. Second of all, this is also kind of like forum, and not many people would think of a forum to be ephemeral. Not everything save-worthy has to be wikipedia kind of stuff.
Uncheck “Send notifications to Email” in your settings. Or get a 3rd party app with a notifications setting.
If it’s easier to delete the post guess what people will do.
Your comment isn’t popular, but we all know the rule: “the best thing needs to be the easy thing”, since people will often choose what’s easy and fast vs what’s ultimately better. We see this in security all the time (hello-oo NPM).
How is it easier to delete a post every time than to set preferences to not be emailed just once, then you never have to again?
How do I do that for just that post? And how do I ignore replies for that post so I didn’t get any other notices?
if you don’t want replies, just don’t post. everyone will be better off than if you are deleting posts. actually it’s the easiest thing to do.
that being said. are you guilty of deleting your posts after they had discussions? because if so, I’ll just block you because you are taking away value from the community, not adding to it
Why don’t you like getting replies? That’s the fun part!
Do something once? Ew.
Do something infinitely? 🥵💦
sounds logical, the biggest logical, even
Ive never heard anything more logical in my life, and I am a cold unthinking machine running on pure logic
Checkmate
Companies already do it with Reddit, so it’s not surprising, their error is to think that the niche open source federated alternative to reddit would make their bs work
oh shit son, you running this show too? Nice work trying to keep people in line and keeping the knowledge around, and again, great work on your light touch moderation on YSK, you’re doing great.
What
Have you checked the modlogs to see if the posts you’re talking about were deleted by the mods? The mods here seem to really not want this community to be a support community and will delete it under Rule 3.
this really sucks. can’t they just lock comments or something
This is more likely the answer. I’ve seen multiple popular posts get deleted from here. I wish Lemmy did the soft delete method instead so that history is kept.
Realistically, a platform where you can delete your own questions so that they disappear for everyone isn’t the best platform for technical support communities. But a platform where you can’t delete your own posts is not the best platform for for a lot of other things, like privacy.
Two use cases without overlap seems like a good argument that there should be two different platforms.
Fediverse is not private in any sense. Anything you post (or up/downvote) is blasted out to every federated instance and only gets deleted if that instance respects the delete command, which you cant rely on.
Too many people are ignorant of this.
I have a belief (not based in law, just my personal feeling) that once you post something in a conversation in a public forum, you no longer have any natural right to control it. By posting it in a conversation on the public internet, you have, in a practical sense, waved any right to control it. That is a part of a conversation that belongs to the public, and you gave your comment away freely. It is public record. You cannot demand that it be forgotten or erased any more than I can demand that something I said to my friends yesterday be forgotten and erased.
If I hosted a forum, I would make it clear that this is the policy, and I would not allow people to delete comments that they posted. Edits would be allowed, but the history would be available. Deletions would only ever happen if I was legally compelled.
This all gets complicated if someone posts private information about a third party. I would rapidly delete such posts and ban such users. The third party never consented to anything, so it’s not the same.
Fully agree. I wish people hadn’t started using their real names on the internet, it’s made privacy so much more of a concern than it had any reason to be in the age of @GoombaStomp69.
Better than fucking Discord. I won’t even engage with a project that uses Discord as it’s support channel. Fuck that.
Sometimes I assume the mods delete them because no one answered
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.
Someone may have the same question in the future and there will be answers.
With 8.4 billion people on this planet, I can’t be the only one asking the question.
and if everyone who asks that question has that mindset then we end up with no answers longterm.
its annoying to scroll through 15 threads asking the same thing looking for an answer, but its infinitely worse to find no threads related to what you’re trying to do.
For technical issues I’ve come to the conclusion that if there are no other people asking the same question, then I need to re-think my approach, because I’m probably doing something silly.
Exactly.
Just go ask an LLM first (ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Mistral/yourselfhostedllm). If it doesn’t know, then come ask here.
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.
Please don’t encourage use of misinformation tools
