I just did some analysis.
3.3% of posts in the last week have been deleted (1.7% of comments).
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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Of these, I must ask:
What percentage were by new accounts?
And what percentage were removed vs. deleted by the user?
If you can isolate that
Yes to the first but no to the second. Anyway the point is the ephemeral feeling is probably not so much because of the deletion (as it's quite rare) and more to do with a lack of date filters on the search.
In PieFed you can set the search to order by recent instead of relevance which sometimes helps but being able to specify a date range while still sorting by relevance would be nice. I'll add it to codeberg.
If you run your own instance of Lemmy, you still can view all deleted and removed posts.
Well, removed yes. Deleted, not always.
Depending on the instance/software on the fediverse, there are scripts that get rid of old content or do not go over a certain amount of data.
Its both security and practicality. Most of us are on tiny instances all over the place. Peoples houses, in small containers in the cloud, that sort of thing. We have limited space that is (probably) not be monetized in any way. This is all a labor of love. Im not saying its all like this or even specific to lemmy, but we are much smaller than the big wigs on the internet.
Everything is Ephemeral. We just help it along a bit and make it work for us.
There was a wave of bots posting maniacally and then deleting the entire account within a day. (Still might be going on, but it seems less frequent than it was.)
I have no idea what they're trying to accomplish by doing that, but anyone who joined around that time would probably feel the same way as you.
Not just bots tho. There are some real users that are just paranoid. Go back to any old asklemmy or NSQ question and you see the (-5) in comments, people run scripts to delete old comments. It's the norm here.
I don't blame them tho. If its like older than 7 days, and you haven't saved the info, I'd say it's fair game for the original user to delete it.
When you can be easily fingerprinted with only a few comments I can understand the paranoid ones.
But I needy community.
I've only lemmied for a few months (technically I had some account very long ago but didn't really use it and forgot about it as everything was dead). I doubt I ran into that, and I think a lot of it is just moderators removing things, and that being far worse than when it happens on reddit because none of the comments are retained nor their structure.
I would use reddit for crowd-sourced hobby advice. If someone gave bad advice, most subs had plenty of other members who would quickly correct them and explain or even provide sources.
Outside of Linux and a few other techy things, Lemmy doesn't have enough members experienced in hobbies that interest me to be able to rely on the community correcting itself.
So I often see, eg, Bob from ABC community says something, but it sounds a little off to me. I don't know enough to say if Bob is right or wrong, and no one is chiming in with better advice. So it's a mostly worthless interaction.
It's also almost impossible to search Lemmy. Good luck trying to find a post from a couple months ago if you haven't saved it or commented on it. Even if it hasn't been deleted, it's almost impossible to find it again.
Absolutely. One of the things that made reddit a pseudo-default of the internet was the ability to find relatively niche information long after. Here, its quite the struggle and I'm not sure search engines play nice with lemmy.
Like maybe there should be some purposefully searchable instances with access to as much as possible for that purpose as a solution but yeah, its very rough.
I don't use Lemmy, what's the issue with search on it? I don't see any obvious issues with the one on your instance at a glance.
Because it is. I understand the want for privacy and such, but it still sucks to have a prolonged topic, just to have the OP nuke the parent post which deletes the entire comment tree. I have communities that I have blocked or unfollowed because a good chunk of their posts just get deleted a few days after posting. It makes it hard to want to contribute to the communities due to it.
Reddit used to be a great repository of human information sharing. The first place I used to go to search a decade ago was Reddit. Reviews for the best product or how to fix a problem, someone in Reddit would have answered at some point.
Lemmy isn't searchable reliably. The platform is purposely fragmented (which gaming community was that posted in? Never to be found again). The userbase here is small anyway so the breadth of content is far more limited. Things worth saving better be bookmarked and possibly saved as a copy, because it will never be found again. Niche interests and edge case problems don't get covered. It's mostly broad interest entertainment content here, and so memes are the only thing I come here for now.
similar stuff, impossible to reliably search and so many things gone after a while. i'm even thinking of setting up a personal instance and having it ignore post removal requests...
When people delete their account or when they are banned by their home instance, all their comments are deleted as well.
Some instance operators do this; but it is still done manually. It's not a feature of Lemmy.
I don't think that's true? I've seen instance-banned accounts that do not have content purged.
Not sure from the banning perspective, but when deleting an account, there's a toggle for whether or not you want to delete your posts and comments along with it.
this experience feel temporary and kind of throwaway.
See a number in my nickname? I have started with 0001. Banned here, server shut down there, some other problems... New account.
Yes, everything is temporary here. Search engines go crazy over the overall decentralized idea of Lemmy, so they mostly don't index it. Just write whatever you want, and move on.
I admire your optimism using four digits.
I dare you to make the numbers hexadecimal.
All fun and games until Lembot_0009 is replaced by Lembot_000A.
My main issue with lemmy is that the feed is just random bullshit 100% of the time. Why even bother allowing me to "Join" communities if it doesn't increase the odds of them showing up in my feed?
Stop using All as your front page...
Doesn't matter whether I go to all or home. It looks exactly the same and never shows posts from communities I subscribed to.
Edit: Been using Lemmy for almost a year and just realized this :\
There's a bit in the settings where you can pick which one you want to show on your home page too.
Subscribed should be the default, like in PieFed.
Natural consequence of decentralised hosting
Natural consequence of offended mods deleting discussion they don't like
Natural consequence of offended admins defederating
Someone deleted a comment right after I responded to it earlier today and I keep womdering if it was even done on purpose. They didn't say anything out of place, and I was just continuing the conversation we already were having, so I wouldn't think they were embarassed or something. Like, maybe they don't even know it was deleted because... Why delete it? 🤷♂️
I just don't use Lemmy that way and didn't use Reddit that way.
That said, I'm not trying to say my way is superior, just explaining why perhaps Lemmy doesn't feel ephemeral to me.
Even before lemmy on reddit I've never really had a main account and alt accounts. I've just changed accounts every few months. I started doing it as away to avoid building up a large silo of comments which could be used to profile or dox me. I think the habit stuck just because it's kind of liberating. I don't care how popular my comments or posts are and I often admit that I'm wrong which I think is a rarity on modern social media.
In this context, the idea of wanting to review my comments on posts, or a mod log, or even someone elses profile is quite foreign.
I've legit never noticed that something I've commented on is gone. Although there's been a couple of times when a post has been deleted while I've been writing a comment.
Epe what? We don't like fancy words like that in here.
