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?
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.
That is why rules are set to keep content with true value. Else it’s content archeology and as IRL you won’t find everything untouched as it was.