Texan_ReverendFeb 25

RE: https://mementomori.social/@rolle/116125657344469470

Now would be an excellent time for @Mastodon devs to prioritize the inclusion of tootctl-style status and media clearing options in the default Admin interface. These issues have been sitting open on GitHub for literal years at this point.

Across the network, we need better and more accessible means of managing database and media storage sizes to keep costs more affordable and to reduce server closures. This need is only becoming more and more pressing as infrastructure costs climb.

Show threadTexan_ReverendFeb 25

In case you're a non-admin user and not familiar with what those features are:

Database storage holds all posts that a server has ever seen - everything posted there, everything that's ever passed through the Federated Feed, etc.

Media storage is all the photos, videos, and audio files that have been included in posts - they are stored separately and effectively linked to by their respective posts.

Show threadRockarioFeb 25

@Texan_Reverend I do wish that users had an easier way to look at their media storage footprint and potentially bulk-delete posts.

Cause you know, love to send memes and dumb images, but at a certain point I kinda want to just get rid of the posts and save the images myself if I think they're worth reposting.

Show threadTexan_ReverendFeb 25

@rockario While I agree that users would benefit from more options & controls over their posts, that's not the big issue for admins.

I don't need or want to purge what people post on Kind.Social, and I don't want folks here to think they have to limit their posting _at all._

The issue is eight years of posts from Mastodon.Social and countless other servers which nobody here ever interacted with and perhaps never even saw.
We don't need to hold these.
We don't need _every server_ to hold these.

Show threadRockarioFeb 25
@Texan_Reverend Agree 100%
I had that "clean up after myself" instinct start even in the first year on here, but that's just a personal thing. Keeping all those old nothing posts from connected servers is not a good design.
Show threadTexan_ReverendFeb 25

@rockario To an extent, I get it and agree with it. Having each server store what it sees so that their users are pulling from local storage rather than hammering other servers with requests for the same post is good.
There just needs to be a limit.

On Kind.Social, I would aim for not keeping posts from other servers beyond a year unless they'd been interacted with.
That still ensures you can see plenty of post history on someone's account.

Show threadblackcoatFeb 25

@Texan_Reverend @rockario Would it be possible to have those posts from local storage still be available to pull from their originating instance?
So, [email protected] posts a picture, nobody sees it, it gets purged, two years later, [email protected] is flipping through alice's posts, gets to the end of the local storage, kind.soc throws off a "hey, gimme the next hundred posts and I'll store them again", then they get purged?

that way history can still get cached locally, but preserved?

Show threadTexan_Reverend

@blackcoat @rockario The short answer is that the backend doesn't currently work in a way that would support that. I think it could be useful to have some method of asking your own server to check for more posts on a remote user's profile, similar to the current system for loading more replies to a post when they've been found.

However, the way it works now is that a server stores new posts from remote accounts after those accounts have become known to it - through user searches, follows, etc.

Feb 25 at 11:53pmWeb