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.
This extends to moderation as well.
If I remove something early on in the chain, it prunes the entire thing. Sometimes there will be rule breaking content, and then a really detailed and well thought out response explaining the issue / debunking the misinformation. I don’t want to have to pick between keeping the good content and removing the bad.
It also gets annoying to moderate because I have to work from the tail end of every chain backwards else I’ll lose access to comments after the prune point.
One positive, the new version of Lemmy will fix this issue for account deletions. Previously when accounts were deleted, they took out all the chains with them. Now you have the option to not do that.
I’ve been running into this more and more recently and it can be frustrating.
Usually I’m looking for some specific piece of info that I received in response to a comment I made, or something I commented on. However if the post was removed for whatever reason I can only view my comment, but no context.
So it seems like the comment itself is still there, so I’m assuming other comments are still there, just only visible for the users that made them. It would be great if this was changed as OP is requesting.
Little add-on: The current behavior kind of makes the creator of a post the “owner” of the comment section. If they dislike an ensuing conversation, even if they’re not involved in it, they just delete the post - “Fuck you, you’re not having that conversation!”. I find that problematic from an ethical perspective.
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
Removed by mod