that is not entirely true from a lemmy perspective. When an instance subscribes to a community, the remote instance gets the last 20 or so posts, as well as subscribes to all new posts from then on. IT has a local copy of that community. What it doesn’t have is any of the embedded media.
AFAIK, this is similar to how matrix works too. I do not know if this is a lemmy implementation choice, or a AP standard?
MeowdyPardner@kbin.social 1 year ago
With activitypub all involved servers also replicate the content so I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to make. That's why we can still see all the communities, posts, and comments on the servers that are still online.