Some accounts are deleting their posts after a few downvotes. It’s devastating on communities like c/asklemmy.
Lemmy doesn’t track an account’s karma like reddit. So, all downvotes will be isolated to your post or comment and won’t affect your account—unless you wrote something truly horrible.
Remember lemmy is a community effort. Deleting a post also removes all comments on it. So you are not only robbing the effort others put in, you are actively removing knowledge from the fediverse. Others won’t be able to find it through search and lemmy will seem lonelier than it already is.
You have to modify lemmy or piefed code to not delete the post from server instances upon request. It happens automatically.
The comments stay and can be viewed on your profile. But they cannot be discovered by others because the post which reveals them to the outside world is gone.
Comments work a bit differently. When you look at a post, and a comment is deleted you can still see its reply comments.
So post is always the starting point of discovery. If you delete that everything inside is effectively gone—like removing the only door into a room.
Hope that made sense.
Thanks, makes sense now.
Still seems like a (server) code level problem to provide sensible handling rather than having to try to notify all users of an unintuitive behavior. I’m guessing piefed would likely listen, lemmy perhaps less so.