Instances can grow fast, and that can be a problem if you have limited disk space. If you don't mind losing history that your users have not interacted with, LPP can help. It will purge posts along with their comments and media before a certain time period if no comments, likes, or saves exist for users on your instance.
I feel like this ruins the aspect of an archive of information where users can go back through and find useful info similar to SO in a way. Maybe there will be a meta search engine for looking through all of the popular instances?
We need a sort of Pushshift for Lemmy. That way Lemmy instances can purge posts for their own survival, while a full archive exists and can be accessed if needed. Best of both worlds. Perhaps the Lemmy project should be working with the Pushshift people to integrate that functionality.
It's a balance between losing information due to purging old stuff, and losing information due to an instance shutting down entirely from costs being too high.
This could be a very powerful tool if the right options are added. One of the things I'd like to see is the ability to set an upvote or comment threshold. If posts were popular, I would like to keep them. If, however, a post received very little upvotes and had little interaction, there's not much value in keeping it. And I'm talking about all interactions here, not just from members of our own instances.
This doesn't seem like a very hard thing to implement and would be well received.
SyntaxError: Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0
at JSON.parse (<anonymous>)
at Object.<anonymous> (/root/lcs/src/index.js:8:30)
at Module._compile (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1191:14)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1245:10)
at Module.load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1069:32)
at Function.Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:904:12)
at Function.executeUserEntryPoint [as runMain] (node:internal/modules/run_main:81:12)
at node:internal/main/run_main_module:22:47
This is what I ran, I am using the Ansible install of the latest version of Lemmy.
cd src
export LOCAL_URL=https://my.full.TLD
export LOCAL_USERNAME=myadmin
export LOCAL_PASSWORD=myadminpass
export PURGE_OLDER_THAN_DAYS=14
export HOURS_BETWEEN_PURGES=4
export PG_HOST=172.18.0.3 #this is the local IP on my box that answers for the docker container that has postgres
export PG_PORT=5432
export PG_USERNAME=lemmy
export PG_PASSWORD=thelemmydb-password
npm install
npm start
If there is anything I can do to help test, let me know. I just reinstalled my server because it had 100 percent filled up and manually deleting files was not releasing the disk space.