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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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!
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!
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.)
To give you some context, I initially made this comment on OP’s post. Then I followed up with this comment after the resignation of a moderator on !selfhosted@lemmy.world.
I was referring to the former moderator’s very bizarre interpretation of Rule 3. You’ll see in the modlogs that many posts that were clearly about selfhosting getting removed under Rule 3.
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”.
“use Google”.
It makes me cringe when I see it in a forum. *Imagine you come to a forum designed to help people do <Topic x>, you ask a question, and the response is 'Google exists. Piss off."
The spiritual heir to ‘RTFM’
Came across that so many fucking times that it’s burned into my psyche. I will go out of my way to list the answer, especially now google is a wet pile of shit technically
It’s a particularly egregious case of “fuck you, got mine”
I’ve never understood why the OP can nuke an entire thread full of comments. Not even reddit is that obtuse.
It happens on reddit all the time as well
No it doesn’t. If someone on Reddit deletes there post, the comments are all still visible.
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?
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
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.
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.
Do something once? Ew.
Do something infinitely? 🥵💦
sounds logical, the biggest logical, even
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
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.
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.
I see now there were 3 posts removed in the past that all seen relevant to the community me. Going back I see ones I’ve read and interacted with.
Seems like it might be more mod actions to me, as others have pointed out. Maybe a more general self hosted community if the mod doesn’t want those sorts of (relevant to selfhosters but not specifically selfhost software announcements or whatever) posts here.
Op pls delete this post
Who’s downvoting this?? Ban those moronic leeches. They’re either anti-community or have the reading comprehension of a potato, ffs.
Quote ppl you answer.
I haven’t seen the posts (probably from deletion) but Lemmy to me is an invaluable source of smart Linux and selfhosters. Seems like a great place to ask questions for problem to me on the surface. Where should people like me go to if I need help? Genuinely asking
The way I read it is it’s not the asking questions that is the problem at all, it’s the deleting afterwards.
Where should people like me go to if I need help?
Here. Just don’t delete the question after you get your answer.
we need to make a list of usernames who are deleting their posts, regularly or even just twice
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.
could be, I think when deleting your account there is a checkbox whether to delete all your posts abd comments
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.
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.
Better than fucking Discord. I won’t even engage with a project that uses Discord as it’s support channel. Fuck that.
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.
As much as I hate to say it OP, but when somebody ask a question they are asking for their own personal needs. And community is like this are actually here to serve an individuals questions. If that’s not the point of why you’re here then maybe what you should do is start a new thread world whatever it’s called here that’s called spell posted library or something like that so that way you can create a community fact sheet about how to do things. Why somebody delete stuff who knows people are weirdly private about openly public things. Maybe people feel embarrassed about asking your question or move it. It’s who the hell knows. But in the end it is their threat to ask questions and if you choose not to answer a question and then you don’t have to. However your time that you took to answer their question did not get wasted as they chose to take that advice and run with it. Just because your question now has to be read explain or your answer has to be reacclaimed in another thread doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t have to be explained in another thread anyways. You’re never going to point to this thread or that thread and say the answer was already here the answer was already there. That’s not how communities like this actually work.
Great suggestion. I think you’re both right - until we have such a library as you describe, we should try and keep this as a community resembling one. But a seperate resource actually designed for permanent knowledge hub would be more ideal.
You’re never going to point to this thread or that thread and say the answer was already here the answer was already there. That’s not how communities like this actually work.
This is (presumably) true. I guess another problem with people deleting their stuff is that it’s “bad etiquette” on the poster’s part, as it creates the illusion that less productive exchange is happening on this sub than really is, which then makes visitors less likely to ask for help here. And i guess the OP is hoping that people who need help will do a quick search before posting about their problem.
You and I both know they won’t. The only thing doing searching is Google bots and AI
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
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #0 for this comm, first seen 5th Jun 2026, 05:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Bruh
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.
