When on reddit, I would periodically go back and “clean up” by deleting a bunch of old posts and comments I made if I felt they were no longer relevant or useful. I wouldn’t do this for tech support questions that got solved (although did I read somewhere that Lemmy was written in rust, and as such is not searchable on the web?) in case they ended up being useful to someone. However things I posted as a lark like “Watch Mark get Zucked,” probably doesn’t merit being kept for posterity (or does it?) and I might delete stuff like that after a year or so, if all keeps going well for me here. Would it help save server space if I did this? Should I just not worry about it? What say you, fellow Beehawers?
It wouldn’t help saving space because posts and comments aren’t purged from the database if you delete them. They remain there but are marked as hidden.
EDIT: only admins (and mods?) can purge them from the DB
Mods cannot purge comments, no. Site admins might be able to, but I don’t think it’s easy to do and not every federated social media platform respects deletion requests.
Instance admins looking to save server space may connect directly to the database and simply delete all hidden posts. This is very limited in usefulness as posts in themselves are really small. Deleting images is much more efficient in saving server space, that’s why it is good practice to use established image hosts for your image posts, such as imgur. This centralizes the image hosting, yes, but the return is much more instance stability, as serving an image and storing it is most of what an instance’s performance is used by.
Is there a fediverse-type equivalent for imgur?
Pixelfed? Not sure it’s supposed to be used that way…
Ah, I see…
As others have said comments are currently not purged. I think they are deleted only if you delete your account. So, if you are really into it, you could apply that as a periodic solution, but it would nuke everything and not just some parts.
In theory, if I understood correctly, you can overwrite your comments and only the new version should be kept in the DB and propagated around the other intances.
So, potentially, you could substitute a really long 10k words essay with a 2 words comment, but personally I don’t see that as a viable “saving space” effort. We are talking about a relatively really small amount of text and space on the grand scheme of things.
Rust has nothing to do with searchability. This is like saying “this table is made out of plastic therefore it is invisible”. The fediverse is searchable on the web, but search engines have not really done their part in actually finding the content. For lemmy, this is excusable as it only just took off, but for example Mastodon is as easily searchable as twitter if not more, but googling for a tweet will have a much higher success rate than googling for a toot.
On one hand it is true that this is a new way of hosting content and that the search engines have to adapt, but on the other I think google has long stopped caring about the quality of their results and is uninterested in indexing actually useful content.
Other people have already mentioned that the comments are only soft deleted but I’d also like to mention that comments are an inconsequential amount of data so it’s not really worth it. What’d take up the most space would be stuff like link image previews and stuff like that
