this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
95 points (95.2% liked)

Ask Lemmy

36194 readers
2057 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 30 points 2 days ago (3 children)

It's also almost impossible to search Lemmy. Good luck trying to find a post from a couple months ago if you haven't saved it or commented on it. Even if it hasn't been deleted, it's almost impossible to find it again.

[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
[–] Credibly_Human@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Absolutely. One of the things that made reddit a pseudo-default of the internet was the ability to find relatively niche information long after. Here, its quite the struggle and I'm not sure search engines play nice with lemmy.

Like maybe there should be some purposefully searchable instances with access to as much as possible for that purpose as a solution but yeah, its very rough.

[–] Tuuktuuk@piefed.ee 0 points 1 day ago

Won't using the search of lemmy.world pretty much solve this? What communities do they not federate? It doesn't need to have many users for one of them being from .world.

[–] Pamasich@kbin.earth 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don't use Lemmy, what's the issue with search on it? I don't see any obvious issues with the one on your instance at a glance.

[–] Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

What do you use? I say this as a lemmy only user

[–] Pamasich@kbin.earth 2 points 11 hours ago

I use Mbin. Used to be on kbin.social, then switched to an Mbin instance when that went under (after trying out both Lemmy and Piefed).

Mbin is a more open alternative to Lemmy which has dedicated support for microblog posts as well, including features like boosting (retweeting) and following. Unlike Lemmy's focus on the threadiverse only.