I really like lemmy and have stopped using reddit months ago. My only real gripe with lemmy is the title: when a conversation gets going in the comment section, that gets killed when the post is deleted, for whatever reason. I can’t even go back to a conversation and have a look at the comment threads to “dwell in nostalgia” (or whatever) if the post to the comment section gets deleted. Piecing the threads together from the inbox and my comments on my profile, and continuing a discussion via direct messages is cumbersome and kind of antithetical.
So, feature request, I guess: Enable retrieving comment sections of deleted (removed from community) posts. Bonus points if new comments could be added after the deletion (/removal) of a post.
A decent approach, as a social platform, would be to use the Reddit model. The content is stripped and replaced with [deleted] if deleted by the user, and [removed] if removed by moderation (with the appropriate log in the modlog). This should maintain the overall comment chain.
I think the issue may be federating the update to other instances. I’m not sure how it works now, but if it’s treated as an edit, that should work like they currently do.
Totally agree. It also happens when a comment is removed and the whole tree of replies gets cut off at that point and is no longer viewable. It’s definitely technically feasible because admins can still see removed posts/comments and all the replies, so I would imagine it’s just a matter of time until the developers can get around to implementing that functionality for normal users.
they need to just strip the content, not truncate the tree. kbin has similar issues
Maybe the option should be removed, because technically you could create your own private Lemmy instance and mirror everything but disable deletion. Now you have all the information available people deleted. You could go even further and create a browser plugin so everyone else could see all deleted posts. You could do the same and create a plugin, to display usernames of everyone who voted on a post, as that information is publicly available. It’s just hidden. So there’s still a lot of work on Lemmy required to streamline this or it might get never solved.
On another note you could create an instance that only displays deleted content. Now I wonder what that looks like. Scary.
