#Mastodon question–does setting posts to auto-delete save on server space/costs, or is it solely for privacy reasons that people do it?
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@benlockwood
> does setting posts to auto-delete save on server space/costs, or is it solely for privacy reasons that people do it?
I think it's mainly schismogenesis. People performatively enacting the Right to be Forgotten to contrast themselves with the practices of 'influencers', where the backlog of past posts is content to be (hopefully) monetized.
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When encrypted group conversations come to the fediverse, people will be able to have ephemeral chats with large groups, but not in public. I'm hoping that it will then become more normal to accept that Public is public, and to leave Public posts up for posterity. Leading to far fewer records of public conversations being broken by auto-delete.
But probably not. As the whole 'Public not public' discourse demonstrates, online culture doesn't always reflect technical reality.
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As others have said, the storage cost of text is negligible (media is a different story). The complete works of Shakespeare add up to 884,421 words;
https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/statistics/
This takes up 24.3 MB of storage;
https://ride.i-d-e.de/issues/issue-9/shakespeare-plays/
A single web page routinely takes up more space that that;
https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
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