Some accounts are deleting their posts after a few downvotes. It’s devastating on communities like c/asklemmy.
Lemmy doesn’t track an account’s karma like reddit. So, all downvotes will be isolated to your post or comment and won’t affect your account—unless you wrote something truly horrible.
Remember lemmy is a community effort. Deleting a post also removes all comments on it. So you are not only robbing the effort others put in, you are actively removing knowledge from the fediverse. Others won’t be able to find it through search and lemmy will seem lonelier than it already is.
Funny thing is, your post isn’t actually deleted in the database of the hosting fediverse server either. It’s still there, and you can restore it.
Deleting your account “should” delete the database entries for your user account, and propagates a delete command out to the fediverse, but the fediverse can choose to ignore it as well.
It’s all a bit odd.
It also doesn’t delete your post from the databases run by the NSA, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.
That’s an advantage - so you can contact them for a copy of your lost data if you ever need it. Helpful!