The tech giants make enough money that they could keep on growing forever, from my understanding.
But the fediverse? Sure the main instances that get enough funding are going to be okay, but what about the single-user instances 10 years from now on when there’s a lot more content to download? Won’t they go bankrupt just by trying to annex the big instances?
And I have the impression that the lemmy giants are going to change over time: does that mean that 50 years from now on, the posts I’m posting here today might get lost in time because the instances that annex it will have shut down by then?
I probably misunderstand how the fediverse works, but my worry is that the small instances won’t be able to hold an ever-growing amount of data forever.
I spoke in absolutes for the sake of readability, but I’m as in-the-dark as can be.
I think people need to be reminded of two big things when it comes to Lemmy:
It is impermanent. Not intentionally, I’m sure most instances will try to keep all the posts for as long as possible. But we’re just hosting this stuff on independent servers (also known as “somebody else’s computer”) and we can’t rely on them to stay online forever.
Lemmy is NOT PRIVATE. You cannot delete your posts, and this is by design. You can edit them, but there’s an edit history, and even if there wasn’t, it would be impossible to ensure that the old versions of your posts aren’t stored on some random, rarely used instance. There is no big man in charge like Mark Zuckerberg that you can sue to delete your data. If you want to use Lemmy privately, DON’T POST YOUR PERSONAL INFO. Don’t post things that can be used to identify you. This is a public forum. Treat it like one. If you don’t like that, go somewhere else.
Sorry, #2 is kinda off topic, but I see a lot of confusion about what Lemmy is and isn’t.
Thanks, I’m also definitely confused about what Lemmy is and isn’t. This clears up a lot.