The new data retention defaults introduced in Mastodon 4.x are totally whacky, for reasons I described in detail in recent comments on SocialHub. One problem it creates is with search, because Mastodon can only search within posts in its database. Hashtag and keyword searches on our server used to produce good results, because of the range of people followed by accounts on the server. Now, even with posts being pruned after a month instead of a week, search results have become very thin.
One of the replies to my grouching on SocialHub explained that;
even in Mastodon you can set different pruning times for images & for posts themselves (it’ll try and refetch expired images on first view).
@lightweight Can we please set a short pruning time for images, to keep the database from ballooning out of control, but a much longer pruning time for text? Ideally never, until they fix the problem where posts that @mention accounts on our server get pruned along with everything else, breaking our conversation history. In some cases I’ve had replies to my posts, and Direct posts to me, pruned before I even had a chance to reply to them.
