I think it’s worth talking about as it seems to be very poir and it’s a major problem towards adoption, one of the several. I have a tendency to occasionally go through my post history to try and remember things I had forgotten about. Go look and see how the conversation may have changed since I last looked and stuff like that when I’m just sitting around bored.

What I have noticed with Lemmy is that way too many posts no longer exist, I’m getting really tired of being able to see something in my post history but then when I try to go to it having it be unable to be loaded and it no longer is around. Most of these threads are not even that old it seems to constantly happen, stuff that’s barely even a month back doesn’t exist anymore let alone the things that are further back.

Meanwhile on Reddit I can still go to threads from like almost 10 years ago and as long as they didn’t get hit by that phase where people went deleting their entire Post history everything is still there. I think the longevity of content is a pretty major issue. I’m not really sure what is causing it, if moderators are just randomly deleting threads, if people are randomly deleting their own stuff or if some instances have retention issues and delete older stuff.

Curious what others think about this, have you been running into it as well? Do you see it as a problem? Why or why not Etc

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    11 hours ago

    (1) some communities choose to delete their posts periodically after some time period. Usually they clearly say this in their sidebar. Communities dedicated to memes - where fresh turnover is expected - are going to be more likely to use such practices than those dedicated to discussions of scientific topics.

    (2) The Threadiverse does not currently inform you when your content has been removed by a moderator or admin. The only way you find out that happened is when you go looking for it and poof it’s gone, or if you are a weirdo who constantly checks the modlog for your account name for some reason. I think Lemmy is going to add a feature to change this in the near future? Here is yours - the phenomena is rare for you but not absent, e.g. perhaps you are wondering about your post “What’s with the insane level of recalls of late?” - well now you know, the mod did not like it.

    (3) As others have said, the longevity is in the Threadiverse, but unless you self-host your own instance, so long as you rely on some other instance admins and post to some other community where you are not a moderator, you have given up control to others to take care of your content, on their terms. This will never not be true, so the longevity here lies in the fact that unlike Reddit or X or Bluesky, we are not controlled by a single monolithic profit-hungry corporate entity - e.g. it is not possible to spin up your own little Reddit, but you can spin up your own little PieFed, Lemmy, or Mbin (or Mastodon, Friendica, etc.). So you can have longevity here, if the admins and mods want that, whereas on Reddit you couldn’t really.