git remote prune – what am I doing wrong?

Question

From the man page:

Deletes all stale tracking branches under <name>.
These stale branches have already been removed from the remote repository
referenced by <name>, but are still locally available in "remotes/<name>".

So I removed a bunch of branches using

git push origin :staleStuff

and then ran

git remote prune origin

However, only one single local branch was pruned. Some of these branches were created by me, some by co-workers. Does this indicate that I wasn't tracking those branches correctly in the first place?

Answer 1

When you use git push origin :staleStuff, it automatically removes origin/staleStuff, so when you ran git remote prune origin, you have pruned some branch that was removed by someone else. It's more likely that your co-workers now need to run git prune to get rid of branches you have removed.