Excluding existing archiving sites, do you have an expectation or think that data stored on lemmy should be permanent? E.g last 20+ years. Would it matter if old inactive content was culled? If you had the ability to export data if a sever was due to go down, what would you actually do with it.
I think it’s important that the data will last. So many useful info can be found at threads, even at day-to-day threads.
I have to agree, Reddit has helped me find answers to questions that other places don’t have.
Reddit legit became my primary search engine when I was searching about privacy concerns (I’m aware of the irony, but it helped a ton).
All the comments and posts I make at a website are generalized and meant to be publicly viewable, I prefer data permanence.
I actually have an unpopular opinion about this issue. I think data being lost over time is good. Only certain select pieces of data should be preserved. Social media is something i think should be regularly purged. It makes identifying and tracking people who use it much easier when you can trace back usage records for years and years. The data is too easily misused by people with bad intentions like govt orgs.
But is it? History is written from the scraps that historians have dug up. Often we mostly get the experience of the ruling or intellectual class of the day. Other times we only have artifacts to go on. The greater persistence that data has today will let historians looking back reconstruct history more accurately, especially for capturing the views of the average citizen given that literacy is near universal.
I think systems have their moment and it’s not a bad thing if (social) content is lost. The ability to manage your own content / solid etc is most desirable if feasible.
Data permanence has to be important, because of what people have already said about usefulness. But, well, I don’t know if this is possible, but I think old posts have to be blocked for new votes and comments. Maybe 6 months old or 1 year old.
The best way to get both data permanence and right to be forgotten (and also protection from censorship), is data sovereignty.
The master copy of each user’s posts should originate at the client.