I’m not sure how practical/sustainable of a project this would be, but I feel that it could possibly be a useful project in the future if instances begin to purge old content due to storage constaints. The archiving service could store all the data using Object storage to archive it in read only. That way, at least people can still view old content in the possible scenario of rampant data loss across the Fediverse.
But why? If you want something to be more permanent you save it or host the content yourself. Social Media should be considered volatile and not be a knowledge base.
Forums are an invaluable source of information for countless purposes. Even extremely old forum posts can be a life-saver.
Forums aren’t really social media though.
And Lemmy really isn’t either. Just like old reddit, it’s more forum than it is social media.
But on that note, forums are a form of social media.