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?
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.
Text barely takes up any space. Just target media and leave text alone and troubleshooting posts should be mostly fine unless they put key information in an image.
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.
So do I. And since there were no rule I didnt thumbs up the ancient but helpful content to keep it alive. Purging is not about censorship but to keep fragile communities alive by keeping above all their true value.