A lot communities have “Posts older than 365 days will be removed.” in their description, but what does this mean exactly? It never says.
- The database of posts only goes as far as 1 year, everything older gets wiped? I hope and assume that’s not it.
- Posts with links to articles older than a year get removed?
- If a thread is over a year old, no new comments will be added?
You’d need to ask the specific mods for each group or instance where you found this notice since there’s to my knowledge no such thing that’s implemented across the fediverse.
Are you sure this isn’t a piefed thing?
Either way it’s an incredibly bad idea, lots of old posts being indexed by search engines will help Lemmy grow. The one thing Reddit has is over a decade of archived posts that answer even the stupidest question.
It really depends on the community. If the community is mostly discussion based help, it’s a bad thing to delete it.
If it’s a community of spongebob memes, it’s less of an issue to delete old posts.
Idk I disagree. Memes are important to memorialize
PieFed dev Rimu answered at https://piefed.social/comment/12376368:
The posts in that community will be deleted after that many days. For remote communities this only affects the local copy of each post and the post will still exist on the source instance and other instances (unless they too delete their copies). For local communities the deletion federates so the post is removed everywhere.
PieFed is intended to run for decades and storage costs money so admins can set how long they want to retain content for, on a per-community basis. It’s up to them to decide what is worth keeping forever and what should be trimmed.
AFAIK piefed.social has ‘forever’ for the retention of all local communities and only trims remote communities. In some communities piefed.social only keeps posts for very short periods, like 28 days, because it’s the kind of content people look at once and has no lasting value beyond that.
In some communities piefed.social only keeps posts for very short periods, like 28 days, because it’s the kind of content people look at once and has no lasting value beyond that.
IMO that’s not for admins or mods to decide. That’s for users and (eventually) historians et al. to decide, and it’s only knowable in retrospect, if ever.
Hell, most of archaeology is digging through literal trash.
Nope, the one who pays the bills decides. If you disagree that’s fine. You are free to host your own instance, where the users can decide how much space they want to take up for saving old pictures.
They can decide if they want to pay for it, but they can’t decide whether other people think it has value or not.
Ah gotcha, now I understand what you mean exactly and I agree.
The one thing Reddit has is over a decade of archived posts that answer even the stupidest question.
Exactly, which is what I want to see with the Fediverse. Could be a PieFed thing yes.
My best guess is that the humans want to hide useful information to be more like “AI”, therefore honouring their future overlords. /s
It means once a post is 366 days old it gets deleted.
It’s the first option on your list.
Not everything is worth keeping.
Admins can configure this on a per community basis.
Awww man…I mean its kind of a good idea, but on reddit I’ve had people reply to 10 year old posts.
Its a weirdly nice feeling.
But I do think we’re in a data hoarding mentality and wish to preserve everything. I think it is important to let things go.
Edit: Though on the flipside, I do appreciate especially on technical posts, to go back and look up people’s answers/solutions to questions I have.
Even if the answer is no longer valid, perhaps the person who provided the answer can offer an alternate solution.
But I do think we’re in a data hoarding mentality and wish to preserve everything. I think it is important to let things go.
In general I’d agree, but I’d like to see a Web where search engines show more answers on the Fediverse/Lemmy instead of Reddit. If the default is removal after 365 days, this won’t happen.
reddit posts were read-only if they were older than a few months until pretty recently
That might have been true for some subreddits, but not all.
I’ve had people reply on pretty obscure subreddits years ago, on posts that were years old.
my ‘pretty recently’ is anything in this decade
Without a specific example, everyone else is left guessing, same as you, but I’d read that as the first option. If it’s a lot of communities, I’d guess it might be the policy of the server they are hosted on.
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Are you certain? Because to me it instantly removes the incentive to contribute since it won’t be retrievable/helpful to anyone beyond 1 year.
It makes sense in communities made to share picture and such, but not where high quality answers are frequent.
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Lol wat. Deleting old posts is bad manners in my opinion, and the db cost is negligible.
Yeah thats it. For a second I thought, “sure they can save money by not storing old data”, but than I realised that it’s like two dollar per year per gb. I’m sure we generate a lot of posts, but a single gb goes a long way if you consider that most images are hosted externally.
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