The one thing I miss from reddit: Being able to look at and continue conversations in deleted posts.
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.
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.
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 didn't consider the moderation angle; likely because I'm not moderating anything around here. Now that you say it, it seems so obvious, and sub par to put it mildly.
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.
I agree with the issues noted in comments here. Truncating the whole comment chain below the removed comment, or removal of post disallowing visibility of discussions that happened there is absurd.
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.
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.