Servers are costly to run and if the community mastodon server your account on is turned off what happens to your content?
Presumably it disappears.
I can see that everyone running their own single instance of mastodon has problems (not having to adhere to community standards, problems with banning), but my main concern with community servers is data longevity.
Is there a way to back up your posts? Oh wait. I just found the Data Export.
@ericlawrey the considerate thing to do seems to be to apply autodelete more than auto archive :-)
@ericlawrey that's what i got going on, for sure. it's all about being cognizant you're on someone else's computer. but someone you respect, so you try to be a good guest. there are even ways to save only some posts for indexing, for example delete all but pinned posts of which you can many. something like that. i'm like you discovering the new platform - so take your time, because it's not the most evident thing to get around the mastodon hey 🚀
@tonic I didn’t know there was an autodelete. I imagine that would save storage on their server. I haven’t tried a data export, but I noticed that it submits a job for the export. Presumably the server would make a zip for download, which would use server resources.
I wonder about a periodic data backup and then purge of old stuff, particularly videos and photos.
Just trying to work out how to tread lightly.