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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[–] ronnypopiel 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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. Albeit without any images or any other non-text content which I think just get copied as links pointing back to the original server.

Now if you are just wondering about the sheer amount of text data, all of Wikipedia is about 20gb so while it is possible to run out of space, it probably won't happen any time soon. Images and video, on the other hand, are a different story.

[–] Kalcifer 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Since everything is federated, there will be multiple copies of the data across many servers

Does this mean that when you create an instance, you have to retroactively download all of the data? Or is it simply copied to all the conneced instances as it's made?

Now if you are just wondering about the sheer amount of text data, all of Wikipedia is about 20gb so while it is possible to run out of space, it probably won’t happen any time soon. Images and video, on the other hand, are a different story.

So what you're saying is to make sure and draw ascii art as a backup 😜

[–] CampfireParade 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does this mean that when you create an instance, you have to retroactively download all of the data? Or is it simply copied to all the conneced instances as it's made?

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.

Federation means that your account on one instance allows you to connect to and browse content on other instances, without signing into the other instances. The instances are "federated" with each other, which means that they trust the accounts on those other instances.

[–] 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