The tech giants make enough money that they could keep on growing forever, from my understanding.
But the fediverse? Sure the main instances that get enough funding are going to be okay, but what about the single-user instances 10 years from now on when there’s a lot more content to download? Won’t they go bankrupt just by trying to annex the big instances?
And I have the impression that the lemmy giants are going to change over time: does that mean that 50 years from now on, the posts I’m posting here today might get lost in time because the instances that annex it will have shut down by then?
I probably misunderstand how the fediverse works, but my worry is that the small instances won’t be able to hold an ever-growing amount of data forever.
I spoke in absolutes for the sake of readability, but I’m as in-the-dark as can be.
I guessy answer is, who cares? Don’t treat a social media account as some immortal time capsule of your life. Keep a photo album, write some diary entries, but don’t rely on any form of social media to be the historical record of your existance. If it’s inportant keep it somewhere you can ensure the preservation.
I’m pretty sure the world will continue long after we’ve forgotten beans and not pooping for X days.
I think people need to be reminded of two big things when it comes to Lemmy:
It is impermanent. Not intentionally, I’m sure most instances will try to keep all the posts for as long as possible. But we’re just hosting this stuff on independent servers (also known as “somebody else’s computer”) and we can’t rely on them to stay online forever.
Lemmy is NOT PRIVATE. You cannot delete your posts, and this is by design. You can edit them, but there’s an edit history, and even if there wasn’t, it would be impossible to ensure that the old versions of your posts aren’t stored on some random, rarely used instance. There is no big man in charge like Mark Zuckerberg that you can sue to delete your data. If you want to use Lemmy privately, DON’T POST YOUR PERSONAL INFO. Don’t post things that can be used to identify you. This is a public forum. Treat it like one. If you don’t like that, go somewhere else.
Sorry, #2 is kinda off topic, but I see a lot of confusion about what Lemmy is and isn’t.
I needed to be reminded of this, thanks.
Still, Reddit is probably the biggest and most accessible source of information in the world, written out of passion by people, experts, professors, neckbeards… trolls… uni students, researchers,
and I wish Lemmy could also become the archive that Reddit is, but if information has a high likelihood to get lost with time, why bother? It should then really only be treated as a very temporary social media which is… okay, I guess.
Everything is temporary. Nothing is permanent. Embrace it and live in the now.
It’s weird to think about, but data has a shelf life. Software needs to grow and be pruned regularly, or it dies.
Social media is both - the data dump is useless without an ecosystem of tools around it, and if the data itself stops interacting with the zeitgeist of the parent society, it basically becomes an old journal. It’s interesting to a very specific group of people, and literally no one else wants to see it (aside from a few gems picked out and cleaned up for public consumption)
At any point we could go back to Reddits explosion after the digg migration. We could pull up posts that mirror exactly what’s happening now. It’d be interesting for sure, and there’s days of then-now posts that people could be making…but instead we just have people telling us about their memories of that process.
Why? Because that data is old and stale. You’d have to hunt it down with tools not intended for it, filter out the best of it, fix broken links, and probably put it through a slur filter