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?
  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
    4·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      No, PieFed posts have a ‘canonical’ meta tag which sends search engines to the original post. The local copy of a remote post is never indexed by Google anyway.

      https://ahrefs.com/blog/canonical-tags/

      Deletion of unnecessary data is a cost-saving measure which makes it much less likely that piefed.social will need to shut down forever. Lots of fedi software doesn’t do this and it has bad outcomes. Check this out:

      mastodon.cloud has 1,300 active users:

      image

      Their running costs are $800 per month and now they’re shutting down.

      I don’t know all the reasons why they’re closing down but clearly that is an insane amount of money for a service supporting that many users.

      PieFed.social has 1600 users and costs whatever the electricity for a 10 year old computer is. $5 per month? On a Hetzner VPS it was about $50 per month.

      This isn’t big tech where more data means more share price or more AI training data or deeper ad-targeting user profiles. This is smol tech where more data means more problems. If we want to preserve any content we need to delete some content.

    • arsCynic@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      21·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • grue@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • Wrufieotnak@feddit.org
          1·
          2 days ago

          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.

          • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            12 hours ago

            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.

            my own instance, to where deletions will propagate as said by rimu. unless I patch out deletions wholesale, which people won’t like if it turns out I’m doing it.

            the threadiverse really needs an undelete service. at least for the text, which should compress very well

          • grue@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 days ago

            They can decide if they want to pay for it, but they can’t decide whether other people think it has value or not.