Or get sick of the avalanche of replies in their inbox, since you can't turn off notifications for responses to a post or comment unlike on reddit. The only way to make it stop is to delete whatever it was.

Also I'm pretty sure by default if a user deletes their Lemmy account most clients also automatically delete all of their posts and comments. If a user gets fed up with us or decides the Fediverse is not for them, when they take their ball and go home that's really what happens.

It can also mean that a mod removed the post. There was a dust-up in one of the self hosting communities a while back, when people were complaining about users deleting their “I’m having a weird issue with this setup, any tips” types of posts after getting answers. People were even talking about rules to ban repeat offenders.

Turns out, a mod was deleting the posts and citing a “must be about self hosting” rule to say that they should be posted in a tech support community instead. But since the mod wasn’t active 24/7, the posts were often deleted after they had already been answered.

The reason I remember it is because the whole thing ended with that mod throwing a tantrum, promoting some random users to mods with an “if it’s so easy to moderate, you fuckin do it then” message, and deleting their account.

But deleting your own post or comments is not permanent, you still have the 'undelete' option, right?

Edit: As I just checked below, deleting your comment results in 'deleted by creator', not 'permanently'.

It doesn't seem to mean that OP did it, because it doesn't look like that when I delete my own stuff?

If we (naively, I'm sure) assume they apply the rules as they're actually written, those make a lot of sense. If they're removing on rule 1 and 5 (no fake questions, especially for some agenda) then that's basically the exact same suspicion I have myself for most of this. But then the majority traffic is spam or even more malicious. hm.

Hm. Kind of a weird thing to be doing then. I know storage prices are up and all, but that half kilobyte of text?

That would explain it, because some of them really are pushing the suspension of disbelief. Which is why it's especially annoying when I go out of my way to assume whoever is not actually completely taking the piss or some other kind of idiot, and treat the question reasonably seriously. Despite what it looks like...

Deleting it afterwards makes me very suspicious indeed because, bluntly, many of the "questions" already felt... stupid... in the wrong goddamn ways. Not necessarily dumber shit, but differently dumb shit than people used to ask on reddit before LLMs, hint hint.

Seriously, have you read some of this shit?