Hot on the heels of LCS (https://lemmy.world/post/557346), I bring you Lemmy Post Purger (LPP).
Instances can grow fast, and that can be a problem if you have limited disk space. If you don’t mind losing history that your users have not interacted with, LPP can help. It will purge posts along with their comments and media before a certain time period if no comments, likes, or saves exist for users on your instance.
I feel like this ruins the aspect of an archive of information where users can go back through and find useful info similar to SO in a way. Maybe there will be a meta search engine for looking through all of the popular instances?
Generally I agree. But I think there are divergent interests:
At some point these conflict and it makes sense to direct efforts specifically toward one if you want it realised.
Purging to lower costs makes sense for decentralisation.
To have a great archive of human knowledge, at some point it would make sense to have instances or services dedicated to that.
It’s a balance between losing information due to purging old stuff, and losing information due to an instance shutting down entirely from costs being too high.