this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Lemmy

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Will Lemmy have virtually infinite growth in storage requirements for servers? What happens in the long term when old, and stale content builds up? Will instances begin to delete old content en-masse? (self.lemmy)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Kalcifer to c/[email protected]
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I'm concerned about the preservation of data. People very often return to old forum posts for research purposes; however, it is of no use if old content is purged. Is there a plan in place for this issue?

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[–] Kalcifer 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not quite. The data isn’t directly copie. Imagine that a shortcut is created that links to the original instance the data was posted to in the first place.

This contradicts what was said in the previous comment:

Since everything is federated, there will be multiple copies of the data across many servers so even if the original server goes down, the data is still saved on the other servers.

This, to me, sounds like a physical copy, and not merely a link.

[–] CampfireParade 1 points 1 year ago

Hey, hey. I spent some more time reading about this and I had it wrong - I thought Lemmy federated users, but instead it does federate some data across instances. As ronnypopiel stated, text content will federate across instances while other media is shared as links to the original instance.

Getting Started with Federation; Federation for Contributors; Another discussion on this topic on kBin