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?

  • themoonisacheese
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    1 year ago

    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.