dsilverz

@WhyJiffie

oh, I too often do this, with emails, where I compose it for a long time, all the while it changes a lot

Curiously, there seems to be a psychological factor behind this: when we’re compositing emails, we are focused on a single mail. Email composition boxes are often bigger and wider than those from social networks, and they often appear as fullscreen textareas (separated from the mail being replied, if there’s any). That’s possibly why it seems easier to do this with email composing. A tip? Notepad apps (such as Noto, Sketchbook, Joplin or even mainstream ones such as Google Keep) can mimick a composition box from emails. My previous reply to you was initially written in Noto, until I transferred it to PC. Perhaps this could help if you wish to apply the same habit for fediverse.

that, or what reddit does: replace the username with “deleted”

In a sense, yeah, “deleted” username placeholdering (automatically, when a person chooses to delete their own account) is also an interesting solution. However, there are some things I forgot to mention in my previous replies, one of which is GDPR’s “Right to be forgotten”, which could pose a legal obstacle for such a solution if, like Reddit, the content is restored against the user’s will (as a context: when people left Reddit to come to fediverse/Lemmy, Reddit undid many of the deletions, so they could both astroturf the Reddit platform (make it appear like they have a large userbase when they don’t anymore) AND train corporate AI with all posts and comments, and this probably led to legal issues or will lead in the future if people eventually find a Reddit’s legalese contradiction inside their ToS and decide to sue Reddit based on GDPRs rights).

In the end of the day, it’s a complicated matter, because it feels like there’s no easy solution that could both respect community AND the user behind the content while complying with certain laws out there, especially when things can unexpectedly change in the future (e.g. corp AI managing to haunt the fediverse) and leading people to decide on nuking entire posts.

@MazonnaCara89 The country I live in (Brazil) overly uses and depends on WhatsApp. From government departments to businesses and transactional relations, all the way to social and family affairs, people is addicted to it, forcing other people (e.g. me) to either have a WhatsApp account or ending up far beyond mere social ostracism (beyond mere loneliness): effectively, the inability to buy, sell, rent or even resolve citizen matters with certain government/state departments (such as receiving medical appointment schedules from Brazilian’s public health system (Sistema Unico de Saude/SUS (Unified Health System) via their “postinhos”/“Unidades Basicas de Saude” (neighborhood public health centers)). They don’t even use the grand old phone calling and SMS anymore: even “calls”, when performed, are made by people/departments/businesses via Whatsapp VoIP functionality.

That said, it’s worth mentioning that WhatsApp has been running ads for a long time: the “Channels” section lists seemingly random “channels”, many of which are businesses with “verified” “blue badges”. So it’s effectively advertisement disguised as veiled “recommendations” from Meta. It seems like it’ll just become worse (to the surprise of no one who understands what Meta is).

I really want to leave WhatsApp, but I’m socially compelled to stay (it’s the only mainstream platform where I still have an account, against my will)… the raw, grotesque distillation from social compliance, worse than depicted in Derren Brown’s documentaries…

@WhyJiffie Disclaimer: I’m not sure if Friendica is respecting the thread format from Lemmy, in my first attempt, Friendica sent this reply as a whole new sub-thread instead of part of the previous sub-thread. Sorry if this is being sent outside the sub-thread, it’s a glitch from Friendica.

I’m sorry for your bad experiences

Thanks

sometimes the person is just in a hurry or something

On the one hand, it makes sense. Hurry is perfectly understandable, given how “modern life” often vampirizes human time (while also vampirizing our attention span, which also corroborates with, and exacerbates, the phenomenon you described as severe attention deficit).

However, the hurry to reply is just another symptom/phenomenon brought by online activities: we’re often expected to act “now”, reacting to real-time information, prioritizing action over (deep) thought… and there’s a Brazilian saying “a pressa é inimiga da perfeição”, roughly translating to “hurry is the enemy of perfection”; things don’t need to be as fast, at least not immediately (not that we need to seek perfection: here, “perfection” it’s just euphemism for well-thought interactions).

For example (a meta-example): this reply to your reply wasn’t written so recently. I saw your reply when it had been 10 minutes since you had sent it (11 hours ago). Then I read it, then I read it again, and again… I read it several times so I could understand all the points you shared. Even though I wasn’t going to reply immediately (i.e. as soon as I saw), I began to gather fragments from my thoughts-replies (which started to pop up inside my head as soon as I began reading), writing these fragments as notes so I could further develop and compile them, only effectively sending when my reply was complete and ready. It’s an old habit of mine, gradually writing and preparing a text/reply/post over hours or days.

Maybe I got this habit through literature, where I often write down and compile my thoughts as they pop up. Maybe I got this habit from Geminispace (a cyberspace within the so-called smallweb/smolweb) where its protocol prefers and encourages raw text over media. Maybe it’s a fundamental part of archetypal traits from ND and/or PDs… In any case, it can be reflected as a proof-of-concept of how interactions can happen without needing such a hurry from the modern web, allowing for better interaction depth.

Also, it can be pointed out how developing a response gradually over hours, in a way, helps with both attention deficit and anxiety. Of course, there are no simple one-size-fits-it-all solutions because each person is different, but it seems like an useful approach (saving/bookmarking what is going to be replied and developing the reply gradually over the day or over a few days, without a hurry to do that so immediately; IMHO, the Web would be slow-paced, but richer and deeper in content than it is nowadays).

brainrot platforms like tiktok really don’t help with this worldwide issue.

Exactly. This is also why I mentioned Geminispace in my previous paragraph: there’s a jarring contrast between its raw text format and the fast-consumption media (not that much of a difference from “fast-food”: readily available, but unhealthy) from TikTok and other mainstream “social” networks, with the former prioritizing brains and the latter prioritizing gains.

very short, meaningless comments, which also have other properties I don’t know how to put into words.

Another word I would think of is superficiality.

The cases where I find deletion problematic always had something useful in them, either the post or the threads.

Losing useful information/knowledge is frustrating, especially in a world that is becoming increasingly scarce of purposeful knowledge… Although I’m not sure how much the things I ever wrote and sent on Lemmy were that much useful for people, I guess there were possibly helpful contents (explanations, tips, etc) among hundreds of personal entries that got deleted. That’s because I deleted my Lemmy account as a whole, so I had no means to keep certain entries I wished I could keep.

One solution could be ActivityPub allowing for a departing user to update its own actor from given posts, replacing it with a community/instance-wide actor (thus a “de-actorification” of sorts), so the activity would effectively become part of a public domain (given explicit consent from both the actor, the community and the instance, of course). But it’s not an easy thing to implement nor to fully achieve in practice, unfortunately.

deleted by creator

@WhyJiffie I’ll try to reply using this platform (Friendica… I had no success with Mastodon, Tootik and Pixelfed). I tried to reply to a reply in this thread but my answer failed to federate (and Friendica doesn’t return their reply in the search box). I’m replying with the following intent: to remind about neurodivergence. I am ND myself (I’m not autistic, but I was diagnosed with schizotypal PD, and I suspect I could actually have Geschwind syndrome; in any case, I’m certainly ND because I can’t think/express nor see/perceive/feel things in “typical ways”). ND people express themselves in non-typical ways (my reply is hopefully an example of that). ND people are often mistaken as AI (and this can further deepen the alienation ND people often feel and suffer from). People often downvote content without further try to engage/explain _why_ they downvoted, and ND content is more prone to downvotes due to sincericide (exacerbate sincerity) and seemingly lack of “emotional resonance” (i.e. “cold-sounding” texts) with NT (neurotypicals). Or, ND content is simply ignored, ghosted, relegated to the void, either because NT people don’t know how to further engage with such a content, or because NT people couldn’t even bother to try and read it in the first place (people are becoming accustomed with short texts, fast content, and ND texts can be looooong). Best case scenario, ND people are replied back with superficial replies because their content couldn’t communicate what they intended to communicate. And this can be pretty infuriating/frustrating, especially because ND people often face the lack of belonging, feeling like they can’t fit anywhere… and this often leads to resigned departure, which you referred to as “permanently deleted posts”. This is something I did: I left Lemmy many months ago, partly because of the many phenomena I described: it feels frustrating to be yourself and being drown into either ghosting, downvoting, superficiality or prejudice, even though I tried not to bother… but what we write is fragments deep from our souls. I can understand the feeling of watching a reply vanishing with an entire post, it’s frustrating… just as it’s frustrating to watch a post being misread or ghosted because I was born akin to an extraterrestrial trying to communicate with fellow humans to no avail. That’s why I often find myself “nuking” my own content: because there’s no reason to keep a communication attempt that led to no meaningful and deep communication. I hope this clarifies one of the reasons why “Permanently deleted” could happen.