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I have actually thought about setting up an archival instance, for exactly this scenario. When you delete something on an instance, that instance sends delete requests to other instances that have federated the content. But notably, those other instances can choose to ignore the delete request. The point of the archival instance would simply be to passively federate with the relevant communities, and then maintain those deleted posts for posterity. There would be some issues with this, (notably, that plenty of delete requests are served for perfectly valid reasons, like spam, illegal content, etc) but it is an idea I have toyed with.
For what it’s worth, one of the self hosting communities (I think /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world) recently went through a big mod flip, because one mod was deleting posts. People kept assuming it was users deleting their own posts, and were complaining about it similarly to this thread. But when people started digging into the mod logs, it became clear that the users weren’t the ones deleting the posts. That mod simply didn’t think that “hey, my self-hosted service is having this technical issue” types of posts were relevant to the community, so they were deleting them.
It’s entirely possible that we’re in a similar situation here. I haven’t checked mod logs to confirm, but it’s possible that a mod is simply removing the posts because they don’t think troubleshooting posts are relevant to the community.
I was there for that, yeah. It did occur to me that this might be a similar case, but either way, I think the solution to deleted posts like this should be that you can still view the comments by going to the link directly or clicking to it from a comment on a user profile.
While I understand that it's hard to recall an arrow that's been let fly into the public forum of the Fediverse, I don't love the idea of automatically saving everything, either. I want for people to be able to self-delete content, and also there's concerns of doxxing and illegal content. I just don't think that deleting a post should make the comment section disappear into the aether.
My ideal scenario here would be:
Of course, I list these as ideals because I realize there's potentially tricky implementation issues. I've never really dug into the codebase, so IDK if some of this is stuff that would require updates to the Fediverse protocol itself to be supported, if some of it would be tricky or a heavy lift on Lemmy and Piefed, how difficult it would be to update viewing apps like Voyager and Jerboa and the like, etc. And there are of course also UX considerations in terms of how to make any of this intuitive to site users. But it does feel to me like the ideal balance of users having the ability to remove their own content vs. people wanting to retain access to their own content and to useful references even when a post is removed vs. moderator ability to curate and moderate communities.