A general description of the proposed change and reasoning behind it is on GitHub: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3697
Linear execution of these massive changes to votes/comments/posts with concurrency awareness. Also adds a layer of social awareness, the impact on a community when a bunch of content is black-holed.
An entire site federation delete / dead server - also would fall under this umbrella of mass data change with a potential for new content ownership/etc.
I’m inclined to encourage we bite the bullet while data is still relatively small and change delete/removed field into a unified status field, enum or integer or is it a character? I think I’ve seen code that says= true and and =‘t’
EDIT: I created a new posting regarding consolidating some of these fields that yield the same results.
And have some timestamps of deleted, even if that’s off on another table. Need to thigh this through some more.
I think the true / ‘t’ thing is just postgres and how it handles boolean fields.
If they’re not all boolean, then yes we should fix.