Granted, I really don’t know much about how all this works, but the thought occurred to me that Lemmy - as wonderfully open as it is, and without any kind of ‘disappearing messages’ or other privacy protecting functionality - is basically a smorgasbord for AI scrapers. Or am I (hopefully) wrong about this?
Personal opinion, this is much more applicable to paper data than it is to digital data.
Magnetic tape storage has one of the longest lifespans for storage before data corruption and even that seems to at best be about thirty years. Even with ideal conditions for storage this is a very short shelf life.
Without regular backups digital data degrades rather quickly and is difficult to recover after corruption.
Beyond that quickly changing technology standards makes it harder to recover old data. PATA/IDE was the standard 20 years ago, how many people realistically have the tools available to recover an IDE drive when all they have is a slick laptop with a USB-C port? Specialized tools must be used to even recover from recent types of media.
Here’s a more nuanced approach. Once this messages is posted, it’s public. during the same day, it will be copied to a bunch of servers across the fediverse. It’s easily available to everyone who cares to look for it. After a few decades, most copies of the message will be gone, but maybe one or two will still remain tucked away somewhere. It’s still technically public, but it’s getting a bit rare. That’s ok though, because nobody cares about 30 year old online ramblings written on some archaic social media that got replaced by the New Cool Thing.
After a hundred years or so, it’s highly likely that almost every record of this conversation is permanently gone. Maybe there’s a data historian who has a personal copy of the entire fediverse. What if that one historian forgets that their Crystalline Omni-Relational Uni-Protonic Tachyon storage, containing the only copy, was in the pocket of the trousers that went into the washing machine? When they hear the spaceship keys clanging inside the washing machine, they stop the cycle, but by that point, the ‘original manuscript’ is already gone. All you have left are some references, summaries, interpretations, translations etc. Nobody knows what the original actually said, but historians just love to debate and speculate about it anyway.