The tech giants make enough money that they could keep on growing forever, from my understanding.
But the fediverse? Sure the main instances that get enough funding are going to be okay, but what about the single-user instances 10 years from now on when there’s a lot more content to download? Won’t they go bankrupt just by trying to annex the big instances?
And I have the impression that the lemmy giants are going to change over time: does that mean that 50 years from now on, the posts I’m posting here today might get lost in time because the instances that annex it will have shut down by then?
I probably misunderstand how the fediverse works, but my worry is that the small instances won’t be able to hold an ever-growing amount of data forever.
I spoke in absolutes for the sake of readability, but I’m as in-the-dark as can be.
I imagine the devs aren’t worried about this yet.
Long-term, I imagine that archiving and culling old data would maybe make sense.
Maybe there will be the equivalent of archive.org for lemmy only one day.
you can trigger https://web.archive.org/ to “Save Page Now”
It says below the input URL box “Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.”
archive.org also has an extension that automatically scrapes webpages that haven’t been downloaded in 90/60/30/7days/24hrs
Mastodon already has something to purge posts older than X days And that’s with reletively small snippits of text generally. It’ll be essential for any kind of ling term running on small nodes to automate removal of posts to avoid blowing up the host’s disk space. There’s also the possibility of ‘purge after X period of time with no activity’ which would make sense for something like this where things can turn into long discussions more often than it does with a toot/tweet.