I have noticed this is occuring more and more. It is a problem that started to crop up on reddit but now I’m seeing here more often. Do you not want other people to benefit from the answers you received? This community is kind of pointless if you just get an answer and wipe it from the web.
I’m guessing that they are maybe worried about someone trying to use past posts to identify them, but:
That’s a really ineffective way to do that, as someone who wants to can still harvest that information if they want to run an instance that records stuff. I suspect that if someone hasn’t already, they’ll probably make a website to display a user’s deleted posts.
There is an actually effective way to do this. Use a throwaway account. Maybe it would be better for Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin to have native support for throwaway accounts or something, but unlike the above, that is immune to having an instance out there log and expose all your past posts and correlate them. And it isn’t a hassle for everyone else who would like to refer to the information later. If you do do this, though, please be nice and don’t grab nice usernames that someone else might want to use on your home instance…use “throwawaySomethingSomething” or something like that.
EDIT: I just realized that not everyone might know what a throwaway account is, though the term was commonly used on Reddit. It’s just an account that you create for a single use, like to make one post, and then “throw it away”, never use it again, so that it isn’t associated with your regular account.
Before I switch to running pifed I noticed that lemmy would still show posts, at least to me as an admin, that where removed elsewhere. It’s not a problem unique to federated things, nothing says anything you delete on a central platform is actually gone either, but federated systems are even more impossible to properly remove things from since any given node could store copies.
So yeah, throwaway accounts if you don’t want it associated is the way to go.