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?
I didn’t mean posts that had a low score and no other reason to purge them. I meant that you could purge low score memes and shitposts before purging the high score ones. If a meme is a week old and has <10 points, nobody is ever going to see it again anyway.
Support posts are usually just text (and not generally a large amount like c/asklemmy), so they could probably be stored indefinitely without any issues. Those communities could do no purging at all or just recompress media.