If they gave more time than just a few months, in example at least an entire year, then people could at least download those files before hand. Not sure how long this would take and how stressful this would be for their servers.
They could also give the option to pay for this. They should know what storing a video costs and therefore could give creators the chance to cover that cost.
You should at least play around with the export options and do regular exports. You really don’t want your diary of over 5 years to be stuck in an unmaintained app. And since this seems to be supporting exporting into markdown - maybe try an export and checkout logseq or Obsidian?
German shepherds shouldn’t be bred at all. They have genetic defects that make them suspect to certain illnesses, such as hip defects. Don’t buy them. They will suffer and you will have an expensive vet bill.
TBH: It does sound bad, but it is one of the best ways to lower the effort needed for moderating. Currently every idiot from every instance can show up in your community and start spamming. You have to clean up after you’re back from work and have other things to do. Set a reasonable limit on account age and karma and that will keep the biggest idiots, because they will be banned or downvoted to oblivion before they can start posting in your turf.
You’re right - it’s great to be able to crosspost, but every fediverse software is totally allowed their own features and if other systems don’t display it correctly, that’s also ok.
But in this case, Mastodon really is missing some kind of “group” feature. We kind of have this with the a.gup.pe - Tool, but it would be nice to bring some order into that chaos.