Over time, Lemmy instances are going to keep aquiring more, and more data. Even if, in the best case, they are not caching content and they are just storing the data posted to communities local to the server, there will still be a virtually limitless growth in server storage requirements. Eventually, it may get to a point where it is no longer economically feesible to host all of the infrastructure to keep expanding the server’s storage. What happens at this point? Will servers begin to periodically purge old content? I have concerns that there will be a permanent horizon (as Lemmy becomes more popular, the rate of growth in storage requirements will also increase, thereby reducing the distance to this horizon) over which old – and still very useful – data will cease to exist. Is there any plan to archive this old data?

  • 018118055@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    20·
    2 years ago

    One way to approach the geometric storage growth would be to not cache everything everywhere all at once. With 1000+ instances, storing an object in a few instances would be ok if others can pull it in on demand. Can use some typical caching methodology like use frequency, aging etc.

  • Hotzilla@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    171·
    2 years ago

    Premature optimization is not good. Content here is not very storage intensive, so I would not yet make it to issue. Postgre can handle billions of rows when indexed right.

  • BaroqueInMind@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    Sounds like the federated instances should consider opening up for donations and paid features like comment awards and animated shit like Discord or Reddit.

  • o_o@programming.devEnglish
    11·
    2 years ago

    Personally I think we should add a differentiation between the storage policies of content which is owned by your own instance and content that federates from other instances.

    The former should be kept for a long time (forever?), while the latter can be cleared more regularly.

    • Kalcifer@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      12·
      2 years ago

      ie oldest postes && least liked First

      This would pretty much automatically throw out all troubleshooting posts. These sorts of posts, very often, don’t receive many likes, as that is not their purpose. On top of that, there has been many a time that I have been saved by finding some ancient forum post that solved my problem.

      • lchapman@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        The real takeaway here is that we are all bad at storing the kind of knowledge you’ll find in a troubleshooting post.

        Perhaps there can be a Lemmy instance that scrapes and mirrors troubleshooting posts across other instances.