This is the reason:
Looks like the PieFed’s old post deletion does not take into account whether a poster is local to a deleting instance or external to it.
At least one banger of mine on this comm is already affected.
Memes on piefed.zip should be safe.
This is a toggle for particular communities that Piefed admins can turn on. It’s purely done to safe space. In the case of piefed.social, which this applies to here - Rimu chose it for most meme communities because he doesn’t value them in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve never used Piefed, so I have so many questions:
Does it do that by default? Is it something you can toggle on/off? Why would anyone want it to do that? Is it healthy for the Fediverse to half self-destructing content?
It is off by default. Admins can set the content retention policy on any community.
On piefed.social I’ve set pretty much every meme, shitpost and anime community to expire after one year or less. Check the sidebar of the community to see, it’s beneath the moderator list.
Good to know. Is that only in the local sidebar or does the retention policy federate with the community info?
I’m not super active in meme communities, but would be nice to know they’re on a ticking clock before I do post something. That, or I just avoid Piefed communities.
All piefed.social communities have infinite retention. Our stuff is high quality and worth keeping forever, it’s just the trashy Lemmy content that gets deleted ;-)
None of those are from a PieFed.zip account. The origination source PieFed.social that you sent the meme from is what deletes the content, not the destination https://feddit.uk/c/fedimemes nor the 3rd party bystander PieFed.zip.
In the community sidebar as viewed from PieFed.social - which also shows below every single post - there is a notice that “Posts older than 365 days will be removed.” So not so much an unintentional bug as poor design to inform users about deletion of content. The documentation could be improved to avoid disappointing people in the future.
All piefed.social posts should have infinite retention. They do not ATM. piefed.social-originated content of Lemmy comms is getting trashed as well :/
Even though you might post into a Lemmy community, piefed.social still has to store the original copy of the meme.
It would be good if the instance chooser showed content retention policies in some way so people could take that into account when they choose an instance.
Fwiw, !fedimemes@feddit.uk (where this community is located and where OP said they lost a banger) is a LEMMY instance. They run a custom UI frontend and backend both currently based off of version 0.19.17 (UI: 0.19.17-2-g4f0da5f5 & BE: 0.19.17-feddit) - see admin’s response to my comment below.
This entire post ends up being a little bit misinformation, sadly, as the phenomena has virtually nothing to do with PieFed, except that is the software that OP’s instance just so happens to run - and even there (highly ironically) OP themselves mentions that their instance (PieFed.zip) does not delete old meme posts.
Lemmy might have to do it with externalized automated modbots whereas PieFed offers the community mods a configuration option to do it for them inside the instance software itself - that’s all? Edit: oh wait, one more thing: in formalizing the process, it also ensures accurate reporting of the phenomena in the sidebar area. I recall on multiple occasions being surprised when my Lemmy memes disappeared, and managed to “discover” their rule for post deletion despite not being told in advance (or maybe it was in an old pinned post or something, but not easily findable in the sidebar).
But meme communities on PieFed.zip should be perfectly safe, at least as safe as on lemmy.zip, and due to the migration feature (remember lemm.ee?), actually far more so.
That said, Rimu’s joking around about Lemmy content aside, the specific PieFed.social instance indeed is truly not as friendly towards meme content, so yes best to avoid migrating meme communities to there if you want the posts to last longer. Each instance owner sets their own policies as to what they want to do with their hardware, and that is what he wants.
PieFed.zip on the other hand is very open to receiving such. So it’s not “PieFed” that is against memes, just one of the quirks about the specific instance of PieFed.social.
Indeed, I posted that from .zip, just in case.
Save on space. It’s set up on a community-by-community basis. It’s turned on for a bunch of meme communities on piefed.social and some caustic ones.
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this is not unique to PieFed - most of my old memes have gotten deleted already from communities on Lemmy. I am not sure how Lemmy communities actually implement this, but I think I recall it being said that they used automated modbots.
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your wording is very confusing, as you say “any meme poster of PieFed”, but at the end you negate your own claim by adding “Memes on piefed.zip should be safe.” Just so everyone is clear, PieFed.zip is in fact an instance running the PieFed software.
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conversely, feddit.uk is a LEMMY instance. They run a custom UI frontend and backend both currently based off of version 0.19.17 (UI: 0.19.17-2-g4f0da5f5
& BE: 0.19.17-feddit).
The deletion of old content has little to nothing to do with PieFed?
conversely, feddit.uk is a LEMMY instance. They run a custom UI frontend and backend both currently based off of version 0.19.17 (UI: 0.19.17-2-g4f0da5f5 & BE: 0.19.17-feddit).
For anyone curious, the modifications aren’t that significant. The two UI changes are adding an explicit
referrerPolicyto iframes and detecting avif files as images. Backend has more changes like blocking NSFW stuff, enabling image proxying for lemmings.world and some user agent stuff.
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Removed by mod
But I’m not quite sure what you’re saying here. I don’t know what piefed.zip’s policy is, but whatever you post on !fedimemes@feddit.uk should remain on there forever, and only be purged locally on piefed instances that have decided to remove old posts after X period of time.
My piefed.social account was an OP of several posts on that community. piefed.social deletes old posts from the comm after 365 days, and my posts made from piefed.social were purged too.
Text and link content, and the discussion technically remain, but the image is broken for anyone in the federation (as Lemmy does not cache external images).
The “delete old posts from an external comm” feature of PieFed is ATM done wrong. It’s wrong to delete a local post only because it was posted to an external comm, whose old posts get purged.
