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 what 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.
Mastodon already has something to purge posts older than X days And that’s with reletively small snippits of text generally. It’ll be essential for any kind of ling term running on small nodes to automate removal of posts to avoid blowing up the host’s disk space. There’s also the possibility of ‘purge after X period of time with no activity’ which would make sense for something like this where things can turn into long discussions more often than it does with a toot/tweet.