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.

  • DundasStation@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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!

    • netvor@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.)

      • DundasStation@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        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.

  • irish_link@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • foo@feddit.uk
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      2 months ago

      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”.

    • Taleya@aussie.zone
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      2 months ago

      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

  • chunes@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I’ve never understood why the OP can nuke an entire thread full of comments. Not even reddit is that obtuse.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • tburkhol@slrpnk.net
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      2 months ago

      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?

      • Axolotl@feddit.it
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        2 months ago

        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

      • solrize@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • uuj8za@piefed.social
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          2 months ago

          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.

        • tburkhol@slrpnk.net
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          2 months ago

          Uncheck “Send notifications to Email” in your settings. Or get a 3rd party app with a notifications setting.

              • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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                2 months ago

                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?

                • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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                  2 months ago

                  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

    • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • roofuskit@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 months ago

        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.

      • curbstickle@anarchist.nexusM
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        2 months ago

        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.

    • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        could be, I think when deleting your account there is a checkbox whether to delete all your posts abd comments

  • happydoors@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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

    • SaltySalamander@fedia.io
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      2 months ago

      Where should people like me go to if I need help?

      Here. Just don’t delete the question after you get your answer.

  • LurkingLuddite@piefed.social
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    2 months ago

    Who’s downvoting this?? Ban those moronic leeches. They’re either anti-community or have the reading comprehension of a potato, ffs.

  • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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      I think a good solution would be to create a community specifically to connect people who don’t want to share their posts and 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.

        • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I spent many years as a software dev contractor working through agencies, but I still don’t see the parallel.

          • frongt@lemmy.zip
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            2 months ago

            I mean if you want personal, private, ad-hoc support, hire someone to work for you personally.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzB
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    2 months ago

    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]

  • NostraDavid@programming.dev
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    2 months ago

    Just go ask an LLM first (ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Mistral/yourselfhostedllm). If it doesn’t know, then come ask here.