Will the posts in Lemmy be locked after some time?

Artranjunk@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 61 points –

What the title says. I'm basically curious if the posts will be locked like on Reddit or if it will be possible to add comments to old posts (a feature which I missed on Reddit).

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I have already commented on a couple 2-4 year old posts by accident

Doesn't help that posts that old are popping up under some sorts they shouldn't be showing up in. Hopefully that glitch gets resolved soon.

I looked into it a couple days ago, seems the fix has already been done. I’d predict it comes next update.

Depends on your instance. Some cache needs to be cleared or something.

https://xkcd.com/979/

Not today and hopefully never for general forum purposes. Worse case, you get somebody that necros an old post akin to responding to an old email chain, or replying to an old forum thread. Usually not a big deal but sometimes it also sparks new discussions if that post/thread had some meaningful content.

Edit: Actually I think @FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world had the best idea. Would be a great option depending on the forum / poster's need. There are some good reasons when you want to "mark a thread as closed"... like bug reports, project tasks, etc. But I feel the default behavior should be to keep post / threads open.

The code currently doesn't have any timed locking feature. Perhaps one day, but not any time soon I would guess.

Personally, I'd like it if it could be set by community or poster: They could allow it to expire after X time or just leave it open indefinitely with a setting.

Long term, that's a decent idea - Mastodon and related platforms generally have a function similar to that, and it saves me scripting "Retrieve post, edit post, replace with '.'"

I never really understood the purpose of it.

Like, I don't know whether the aim was to address some sort of abuse, or whether it was to reduce Reddit's storage costs in some way or what.

A few guesses:

  • it stopped the OP being forever notified of comments on everything they've ever posted
  • force conversation into the "fresh" post (reposting on Reddit was allowed even encouraged, I suppose it's clear their purpose was to drive engagement at the expense of being spammy and repetitive)
  • reddit's search was shit so I guess you would get a dozen results for a news headline some unrelated and old and it was to stop people commenting on old threads by accident? I dunno