A lot communities have “Posts older than 365 days will be removed.” in their description, but what does this mean exactly? It never says.

  • The database of posts only goes as far as 1 year, everything older gets wiped? I hope and assume that’s not it.
  • Posts with links to articles older than a year get removed?
  • If a thread is over a year old, no new comments will be added?
  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    19 hours ago

    No, PieFed posts have a ‘canonical’ meta tag which sends search engines to the original post. The local copy of a remote post is never indexed by Google anyway.

    https://ahrefs.com/blog/canonical-tags/

    Deletion of unnecessary data is a cost-saving measure which makes it much less likely that piefed.social will need to shut down forever. Lots of fedi software doesn’t do this and it has bad outcomes. Check this out:

    mastodon.cloud has 1,300 active users:

    image

    Their running costs are $800 per month and now they’re shutting down.

    I don’t know all the reasons why they’re closing down but clearly that is an insane amount of money for a service supporting that many users.

    PieFed.social has 1600 users and costs whatever the electricity for a 10 year old computer is. $5 per month? On a Hetzner VPS it was about $50 per month.

    This isn’t big tech where more data means more share price or more AI training data or deeper ad-targeting user profiles. This is smol tech where more data means more problems. If we want to preserve any content we need to delete some content.