TL;DR: The bot is configured to condense certain instances and communities. At the moment, only beehaw.org is marked to be condensed.

Quickly looking at the source code, it seems ReplyToPostsCommand uses a SummaryTextWrapper, which contains an iterable for both CondensedSummaryTextWrapperProvider and DefaultSummaryTextWrapperProvider. The DefaultSummaryTextWrapperProvider has a priority of -1_000 (so it’s always checked last) and is set to always return true on the supports(Community $community): bool. CondensedSummaryTextWrapperProvider references the config/services.yaml for it’s supports(Community $community): bool call which lists 0 condensed communities and 1 condensed instance, being beehaw.org.

Looking over the github issues I couldn’t find a feature request for this, so it seems like it’s not being considered at the moment. You could make a suggestion over there, I do think this feature would be useful but it’s up to the devs to implement it.

That being said, I wouldn’t count on this feature being implemented. This will only work on instances that obey the rules so some instances could remove this feature. When you look up your account on my instance (link here), it is up to my server to respect your option to hide your profile comments. This means the options have to be federated per-user, and adds a great deal of complexity to the system that can be easily thwarted by someone running an instance that chooses to not follow these rules.

If your goal is to stop people looking up historical activities, it might be best to use multiple accounts and switch to new accounts every so often to break up your history. You could also delete your content but this is again up to each instance to respect the deletion request. It’s not an optimal solutions but depending on your goals it is the available solution.

Edit: Also if your curious about the downvotes, it’s not the subject matter but your post violates Rule 3: Not regarding using or support for Lemmy.

Best I could find is here, which is an article by Randall Munroe (the xkcd artist), and states:

davean (the xkcd sysadmin) wrote the patch

This blog post links to another wayback machine page (thank you archive.org!) here, which explains the sorting algorithm and states it’s original author:

Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson.

Haven’t talked to many billionaires then, they love how the government helps them.

It all depends on the size of your instance, but surprisingly little. The most expensive part of running an instance at the moment seems to be users interacting/posting. I’ve had my single user instance running for 22 days, here’s what I have found.

Hardware: I was running it on an HP Chromebox G1 i7-4600U just fine, I did move it to a HP DL360 G7 but this is overkill.

Network: I have 100Mbit/s down and 24Mbit/s up, I can’t even tell when lemmy is federating on my bandwidth charts. It seems to use very minimal network data. Hosting content or users will increase the data requirements, you’d have to get data from larger instances for a perspective there.

Disk: I’m using 4.7G for the postgres and 6.2G for the pictrs after having the instance online for 22 days. This will all depend on how active the communities you subscribe to are. My pictrs is only thumbnails sent during federation, and I have read these purge after some time but haven’t verified these claims.

TLDR; if you have some old hardware around stick a decent sized HDD or SSD in it and you’ll be able to host your own instance for personal use. If you have more users or host images on your instance, the requirements will go up so avoid this if network/disk space is scarce.

Being proudly ignorant of everything is bad. I will respect people who know they don’t know things though, you can’t know everything about everything. It’s why people generally specialize in a field in an industry.