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This community isn't your personal adviser (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 33 points 5 months ago (9 children)

Hadn't noticed, but wow. I wonder what the motivation is to delete info that would help other people.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (7 children)

    There are a couple of accounts who were doing this regularly for some reason on all sorts of different topics. But I would need to see more evidence of this happening. As someone else mentioned it could be mods or a couple rare cases or all sorts of things.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Lately in all of the lemmys like each time I go to look at my replies (if I ever get one), the reply, my comment, and the thread are all gone. I'm often thinking it's mods just nuking threads because of inflammation or whatever.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I wonder if someone is trying out an AI or something and seeing the results. Then deleting. More evidence will pop up eventually.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    My guess was that it’s users who fundamentally misunderstand federation, and think that deleting their comments will prevent them from being scraped or used to ID them later. In reality, if someone was truly concerned about avoiding doxxing, they’d just switch accounts. Because anyone can spin up a single-user instance, federate to scrape content from all the communities they want, and then simply refuse to respect delete requests.

    Because when you delete something on a Lemmy instance, the instance simply sends a delete request to all the other instances that federated with it. But those other instances can easily ignore the delete request and retain the deleted content for as long as they want.

    That’s also part of why it’s so stupid that AI crawlers are scraping Lemmy and thrashing instance owners’ rate limits. The AI crawler could just set up a new instance and automatically gather the content via federation. But instead, they just send crawler bots. Because fuck the instance owners, I got my content either way and using a crawler bot didn’t require me to learn how federation works.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    My guess was that it’s users who fundamentally misunderstand federation, and think that deleting their comments will prevent them from being scraped or used to ID them later.

    I really don't understand these people. If you don't want to be doxxed or scraped, stop participating online. It's that simple. Even if you participate in a private sub, it will eventually get scrapped.

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