Posts on Lemmy feel very ephemeral to me.
It feels like so many posts end up deleted, and then unlike the obvious main alternative reddit, all of the comments, the history of those comments, their trees, and the discussions that were had along the way are gone too.
You could want to recall what someone said a week later, if they for instance, linked to something interesting, or you found more information on a topic or you simply came back late to their response, and you get nothing. No idea what happened, no information about said post, and that’s it.
It feels like this happens to a very far from insignificant amount of posts and it is just one part of why Lemmy feels so short-lived/temporary/ephemeral to me.
Posts being removed means so much more, user profiles are difficult to navigate and unsearchable, there are no accumulated values publicly available, bans don’t have appeals, communities don’t have moderator chats, mod logs only semi work and can be circumvented (eliminating the point of having them), server up-time is a bit shaky, drama means things sometimes break with inter server communication and more.
These all feel fixable, but it just feels like a large number of things conspire to make this experience feel temporary and kind of throwaway.
I just thought, surely other people feel similarly so I pose this question to see what other people think about it.
Why does Lemmy feel ephemeral to you?
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.
I would certainly strongly disagree with any idea that this help security outside of security theatre. This is after all, a public forum.
Practicality wise, I doubt this is the reason it feels so ephemeral, because I feel like most of the removals I’ve run into were for relatively recent content, and likely mod removals (you’d never know though…)