I think it’s worth talking about as it seems to be very poir and it’s a major problem towards adoption, one of the several. I have a tendency to occasionally go through my post history to try and remember things I had forgotten about. Go look and see how the conversation may have changed since I last looked and stuff like that when I’m just sitting around bored.
What I have noticed with Lemmy is that way too many posts no longer exist, I’m getting really tired of being able to see something in my post history but then when I try to go to it having it be unable to be loaded and it no longer is around. Most of these threads are not even that old it seems to constantly happen, stuff that’s barely even a month back doesn’t exist anymore let alone the things that are further back.
Meanwhile on Reddit I can still go to threads from like almost 10 years ago and as long as they didn’t get hit by that phase where people went deleting their entire Post history everything is still there. I think the longevity of content is a pretty major issue. I’m not really sure what is causing it, if moderators are just randomly deleting threads, if people are randomly deleting their own stuff or if some instances have retention issues and delete older stuff.
Curious what others think about this, have you been running into it as well? Do you see it as a problem? Why or why not Etc
Ah yes. Lemmy really was not designed to appeal to end-users so much as self-hosters who want to spin up their own instances.
Then the Rexodus came, and of course people want what they want, but the entire design philosophy only makes sense when you see it in that light. Westerners primarily still only want a “Reddit replacement”, except somehow without spez at the helm, whereas Lemmy is actually pushing for something entirely different: decentralization.
At which point instances going poof is a feature not a flaw in that model. Though images disappearing could be worked on to better serve a variety of needs - e.g. posters could set a flag that their image is higher priority - and perhaps mods and definitely admins could then modify that - which could affect the automated longer term storage handling.
But Lemmy still isn’t finished yet, despite how many years have gone by, and due to how slow it is to change (driven in large part by it being written in the highly complex and niche Rust language, but several other factors exist as well including funding, which interrelates with the whole tankie issue, etc.) now many people are giving up on it and pinning hopes instead on PieFed to drive changes to the Threadiverse (it being written in Python and with a highly productive and passionate team of volunteer developers who aren’t asking for money before making such things happen).
So I expect things to change in this regard, but in all likelihood in PieFed but whether Lemmy itself ever decides (or is able) to catch up with it I cannot guess. Maybe eventually, one day, in another few years.