Over time, Lemmy instances are going to keep aquiring more, and more data. Even if, in the best case, they are not caching content and they are just storing the data posted to communities local to the server, there will still be a virtually limitless growth in server storage requirements. Eventually, it may get to a point where it is no longer economically feesible to host all of the infrastructure to keep expanding the server’s storage. What happens at this point? Will servers begin to periodically purge old content? I have concerns that there will be a permanent horizon (as Lemmy becomes more popular, the rate of growth in storage requirements will also increase, thereby reducing the distance to this horizon) over which old - and still very useful - data will cease to exist. Is there any plan to archive this old data?
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Honestly selective purging might work. There definitely some communities we should keep but if you purge like !memes, I don’t think anyone would care.
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That’s not a good metric either. There are many low scored posts I found on Reddit that were immensely helpful for some niche issue I was having.
While I’d still prefer to keep it, I’d agree that content meant for entertainment such as memes aren’t as valuable for long-term archival though. You can always get entertainment in so many places and forms but you can’t revive lost knowledge.
The most value memes could have would be for historical analysis.
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This would pretty much automatically throw out all troubleshooting posts. These sorts of posts, very often, don’t receive many likes, as that is not their purpose. On top of that, there has been many a time that I have been saved by finding some ancient forum post that solved my problem.
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The real takeaway here is that we are all bad at storing the kind of knowledge you’ll find in a troubleshooting post.
Perhaps there can be a Lemmy instance that scrapes and mirrors troubleshooting posts across other instances.
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Well, maybe you won’t, but others might. That was the great thing about Reddit. Found a sub that might be interesting? Browse its top content of the last ten years and you’ll see. Have a specific programming question? Google it with site:reddit.com and you’ll likely find a good discussion on it. Reading on old interview somewhere and wonder if someone ever fact-checked that one statement there? The guys at Reddit likely have.
Even before the blackout it already happened way too often that you stumbled upon an interesting Reddit thread just to see that one of the central comments has been deliberately deleted by its author and so the whole thing gets less helpful. Would be a shame if the system itself would further delete even more content.
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Why are people downvoting this? It’s just practical. If you don’t reduce the amount of storage you use, the cost of storing will constantly and steadily rise, will donations or personal budgets keep up? Maybe on lemmy.world or other mega instances but it just won’t be the case for everybody. I think purging old content is gonna be a reality eventually, even if it takes a really long time before it catches up to the larger instances. And it’s going to be OK as long as, as this person suggested, the rules for purging old stuff is tenable for everybody.
For example, does lemmy.world, lemm.ee, and sh.itjust.works really NEED to keep each other’s entire federated post history, in perpetuity? As these guys grow larger wouldn’t it make sense to start purging very old duplicate content between them? Stuff that hasn’t been accessed on the instance in, say, over a year? Mind you, I believe that before we get to this point, there will be other systems in place. For example, the Reddit archive sites were never run by Reddit, and they often contained ads or other monetization strategies. Donations can keep the most recent or relevant content up on the instances, but somebody somewhere is gonna have to pay for this content to stay out there. For all we know, it’s gonna be fucking Google and their seemingly unlimited cache. For all we know, some person at Google is spending his 20% personal project time subscribing a bot to everything on the fediverse and collecting data for some kind of new search engine right this very second on Google’s hardware.
Anyway, just some food for thought.
People always assume they deserve to have stuff hosted on the internet forever for free. I’ll donate a good chunk for my instance for sure, but I’m not going to be shelling out hundreds of dollars a month for it either.
If people care so much about it staying up forever they can start donating.