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?

  • Boinketh@lemm.eeEnglish
    33·
    1 year ago

    The thing about these forums is that they act as a big repository of content and information. Purging old content ruins that and makes Lemmy a lot less valuable as a whole.

    • morrowindEnglish
      121·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Boinketh@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        That’s a great idea, especially if you also target low score posts first. I don’t know the technical details of Lemmy, but storing text should be very cheap in general, so just targeting low score posts and posts that use a lot of memory (images and ESPECIALLY videos) could save a lot of space. They could also recompress old images and videos to sacrifice some quality instead of outright deleting them.

        • AtemuEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          if you also target low score posts first

          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.

          • Boinketh@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            I didn’t mean posts that had a low score and no other reason to purge them. I meant that you could purge low score memes and shitposts before purging the high score ones. If a meme is a week old and has <10 points, nobody is ever going to see it again anyway.

            Support posts are usually just text (and not generally a large amount like c/asklemmy), so they could probably be stored indefinitely without any issues. Those communities could do no purging at all or just recompress media.