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?
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.