Interesting take. I like the light philosophical bend there with the mental value. I think you’re right about that. I have been more considering whether the cumulative data of a platform like Lemmy as a whole is something that we as the users/server should be asserting our ownership of. Or, whether it is effectively worthless.

[–] DosDude@retrolemmy.com 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Federation is a double edged sword imo. The data might be valuable to some in the future, like reddit is if you have a problem, there often is a thread about it. But being that most servers are self-hosted, the data can dissappear more easily than a big corporation hosting it. But I rather take it. For the support Foss and for cutting ties to big corporations.

I'm not sure if, for instance, I stop hosting my server, if the community data is archived on other servers. I'm not a programmer.

[–] thepiggz@programming.dev 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I’m a programmer. If someone had an interest they could preserve all of your self-hosted data without your permission. I think it is worth considering tho, if all of this is valuable then it would be ideal if we could get that value into the accounts of people in need rather than the alternative.

[–] DosDude@retrolemmy.com 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Sounds like it wouldn't be a bad thing archiving it somehow. A lemmy archive of sorts. For preservation. Not saying my instance has a lot of value, but linux questions, fixes for games etc on the lemmyverse as a whole. It could be text only, so it doesn't have to take up an exorbitant amount of storage.