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?
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.
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.
