Hi all, I’m a Lemmy FOSS app contributor that’s made a couple of tools for people starting small instances including Lemmy Community Seeder (LCS) for building content on new server’s All Feeds and Lemmy Post Purger (LPP) for clearing old posts on smaller instances.
Today I’m releasing Lemmy Defederation Sync (LDS). When launching a new Lemmy instance, administrators may not understand the necessity of defederation with problem instances. Using LDS, you can sync your instance’s “blocked instance” list with that of another server(s) whose admins you trust.
Reduce the footprint of the install. Text posts and comments are negligible but pictures chew through storage.
And does this only delete visual media by default? If not, this is worse than anything reddit has done ever. I frequently save posts and links to myself in the form of links, for later processing. This would mean that by the time I get to it (can easily be years, honestly), it will have disappeared forever.
Not everyone who participates with their own instance can afford storage. Some users might have bandwidth restrictions. It’s the Fediverse. Wild, unpredictable and anyone can participate.
It doesn’t delete anything that anyone on the instance upvotes, downvotes, comments on, saves, etc. Its mainly a tool for personal instances.
Just to give some context, I have a one user instance running on a very lightweight Debian container containing only lemmy. After the 2 weeks I’ve had it up it’s at 6gb storage used. No clue how it would scale with more users federating with more communities but I could see it getting pretty big pretty fast.
regardless of the tools, you should never trust something online to stay for long, there are so many things that can cause a post to be deleted, poster deleting it, server going down, admin error, change of rules etc, lemmy has got the advantage of having an open api, use it to save your shit and don’t expect anything to stay online for long
Don’t know but it would be a good idea to ask your instance admin if you’re worried about it. They’re the ones that foot the bill for the server and it’s storage and the ones that would be doing the deleting whether using this tool or not.