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.
Image hosting is a good use case for IPFS explicitly without pinning. Stuff that’s popular sticks around, stuff that’s very popular gets wider dispersion in the CDN, but stuff that isn’t popular just kinda gets forgotten.
Is there a fediverse-type equivalent for imgur?
Pixelfed? Not sure it’s supposed to be used that way…
Another guy mentionned IPFS and it’s about what you would want for this application.
Ah, I see…