cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17779430
A large percentage of threads I’ve created or participated in have been deleted. Worse is that when visiting the URL everything is completely gone.
This is much more drastic when compared with Reddit thread deletions, where the thread is there and so is the discussion. And the creator of the thread has access to their content.
The Lemmy method discourages people from participating in threads and creating high-quality content, much more so than the Reddit method.
A bunch of lively and useful discussions on Lemmy have completely disappeared. And it makes it seem like a waste of time to even contribute content here.
EDIT: I see that the “fediverse” link for posts has been removed. I posted this to lemmy.ml from a lemmy.world account and there’s no way for me to get the lemmy.ml link now. And when I crosspost it it shows a lemmy.world link instead of the lemmy.ml one. I think this should be changed [back].
The “fediverse link” on a post always points to the instance of the person who posted it, not the community instance. When posting from a lemmy.world account this means the fedilink is always the lemmy.world post link.
It is only shown for content coming from remote instances in Lemmy UI 0.19.3, although a later version changed that to always show.
I’m only seeing those links on comments, not the thread. Has it always been like that?
“The instance of the person who posted it” seems to be reasonable for comments, but not the thread.
I think it is not only reasonable, but better this way. The canonical server is the one the post originates from. Each server is responsible only for its own users and their content.
I don’t see any difference between posts and comments either. Why is one ok and the other not?
it doesn’t matter whether you consider it reasonable, as it’s this way for technical reasons.
when a post or comment are created they are created on the users instance. the users instance then tells the community instance about the new post/comment and the community instance relays (announces) this to other instances that have community subscribers.
the fedilink is an id and reference to the original item. this unique id is known to all servers that know about this comment and it is what is used when updates to the post are distributed. except for the reference to the item on the originating instance, no instance stores information about where to find a specific post/comment on a random other instance.
It sounds like you’re saying it’s impossible, but I’m doubtful of that. Currently there is no fediverse link for the thread, so I think one could be added that links to the lemmy.ml post. I crossposted from lemmy.ml and the crosspost should say so.
If the devs conclude it’s not possible or wanted, that’s fine. But this is my feedback.
I’m not saying it’s technically impossible, although it would likely be a bit challenging to integrate on the technical level, as the community instance has no authority to modify the post itself other than removing it from the community at this point.
The existing fedilink is already present for technical reasons anyway, so this is currently only showing existing data.
Why would you want a lemmy.ml link though? On Lemmy you’re typically intending to stay on your own instance, which many third party apps already implement. For Lemmy UI there is already a feature request to implement this, although it might still take some time to get done. If you have the canonical link to an object (which will always point to the users instance) Lemmy can look up which post/comment you’re referring to in its db without any network calls when it already knows about the entry. If you were linking to the lemmy.ml version of that post then the instance would first have to do a network request to resolve that and then it would realize it’s actually the lemmy.world version that it may or may not know about already.
That’s where the thread is. It was created on lemmy.ml and crossposted to lemmy.world. When crossposting from lemmy.ml to lemmy.world it says “crossposted from lemmy.world”, which is wrong and confusing, and defeats the purpose of crossposting (informing people about similar communities or other instances).
Except it wasn’t created on lemmy.ml, it was created on lemmy.world.
lemmy.world then informed lemmy.ml that it is intended to be published in the community that it was created for.
It doesn’t say “crossposted from lemmy.world” but “crossposted from canonical_post_url”. This is not wrong in any way, although it might be a bit confusing and could likely be improved by including a reference to the community. The instance domain should for the most part just be a technical detail there.
It should also be noted that this format of crossposting is an implementation detail of Lemmy-UI and other clients may handle it differently (if they’re implementing crossposting in the first place).