It probably wouldn't be hard to make a fork of Mastodon, Pleroma, etc... that deletes posts after a time limit and refuses to remote-fetch anything exceeding it

It probably wouldn't be hard to make a fork of Mastodon, Pleroma, etc... that deletes posts after a time limit and refuses to remote-fetch anything exceeding it. Of course, it wouldn't be able to impose that mandate on the rest of the network, and I don't think you'd convince many people to use it. I find Mastodon has a slower pace than corporate social media, and I like it that way. I want to browse posts when I have time for it. I have a crude patch running on my own server to backfill old posts from remote accounts when I scroll, which is very much the opposite idea. I hate this suggestion, and I hope nothing like it becomes popular enough that I feel I must interact with it.