A large percentage of threads I've created or participated in have been deleted. Worse is that when visiting the URL everything is completely gone.
This is much more drastic when compared with Reddit thread deletions, where the thread is there and so is the discussion. And the creator of the thread has access to their content.
The Lemmy method discourages people from participating in threads and creating high-quality content, much more so than the Reddit method.
A bunch of lively and useful discussions on Lemmy have completely disappeared. And it makes it seem like a waste of time to even contribute content here.
EDIT: I see that the "fediverse" link for posts has been removed. I posted this to lemmy.ml from a lemmy.world account and there's no way for me to get the lemmy.ml link now. And when I crosspost it it shows a lemmy.world link instead of the lemmy.ml one. I think this should be changed [back].
I've never seen "nazi shit" on Lemmy. The threads that have been deleted have all seemed on-topic with normal discussions taking place. The last one was a "what made you leave reddit?" thread with hundreds of comments.
If you're referring to the post Ex Redditors of Lemmy what made you come on over? What happened at Reddit that you made the switch?, their account was banned for trolling and all content associated with the account was removed.
Some examples of their post titles, that likely contributed to their ban
African Americans (I hope that PC) have you ever gotten the N word tossed at you and how did you react or feel?
How come in most games including the community of gaming I can't mention the word Nazi for have a civil conversation?
They also had a number of other posts that seemed to be doing just fine, so it might be falling in the "stupid kid" category.
Yep, that was one of them. Do you think that's a good mechanism to automatically delete all user's content when they get banned? Those example titles you shared don't seem like obvious trolling nor obviously worthy of an account ban, and the collateral damage of deleting valid & popular threads seems bad.
It's not automatic, admins have the option to ban with or without content removal.
Different instances deal with this differently and admins are also humans that sometimes make mistakes. Especially during holiday season there are frequently trolls running around with racist, transphobic or other offensive content. Sometimes they're more obvious, sometimes they try to fly under the radar a bit by being less direct. In the end you're at the mercy of the instance admins of the instance you signed up with and many instances will provide contact information to appeal bans.
Since this account was not a Lemmy.World account it's not up to us to decide whether or not the user should be banned and whether their content should be removed.