It looks like I pruned away 50% of my posts!

@Tim_Eagon I have traditionally done One Week with a threshold of 10 likes or three shares. I recently throttled it up to 15 likes or 5 shares, which has things nice and tidy (of course, I also manually delete a lot of posts even if they're well-liked or reblogged).

@SJohnRoss @Tim_Eagon What’s the motivation for deleting posts? I know everyone has different thresholds for what they want to remain online. Just curious.

@skippy @Tim_Eagon It saves the host hosting-money, which is important. Beyond that: this is my ephemeral stuff, so auto-delete helps keep it ephemeral (back when I was active on the Twooters, I used an external service to auto-delete my posts there).

One of the reasons I'm barely active on Bluesky is that they have no auto-delete, and none of the third-party services seem to work well.

@SJohnRoss @Tim_Eagon Thanks.

The ephemeral bits are always interesting to me. Why start or engage in a conversation if you’re going to purge it? (Total rhetorical question!)

@skippy @Tim_Eagon It's hard to parse that question (rhetorical or not).

My best comparison, off the cuff:

I eat pizza knowing I'll poop it out later. Keeping the pizza inside my body forever was never the idea.

@SJohnRoss @Tim_Eagon That’s a fascinating analogy.

@skippy @SJohnRoss @Tim_Eagon
If you think about it, all of our oral conversations are ephemeral. Seems sensible enough to me.

I never thought about the hosting costs bit. I'll have to set something for mine too.

@skippy @SJohnRoss It helps my instance admin with their server costs, but realistically, this isn't set-up with permanence in mind in the first place.

@DejahEntendu @skippy @SJohnRoss I have mine set-up to delete after 6 months if my posts don't reach a certain threshold of favorites or boosts. I also save DMs and my own posts if I bookmark or favorite them for some reason.

@skippy @SJohnRoss @Tim_Eagon

My posts are such pearls of wisdom that if they remained out there, too many people will become smart and there would be an imbalance between smart and stupid people - knocking the earth off of its axis and destroying humanity.

(Really, I do not want the fascists to see them or be able to prove that I said something that they find insulting and hold them against me.)

@jay_chi @skippy @SJohnRoss Mastodon search is so hot-or-miss too, so good luck finding something more than a few months old that didn’t go relatively viral in the first place!