Submitted 10 months ago by artifex@lemmy.zip to fediverse@lemmy.world
While I understand the concept of federation I’m unclear as to what it actually entails at a technical level. When lemm.ee eventually shuts down, will all of that user content (posts, comments, votes, etc) cease to exist? Is it mirrored on other instances?
All the images disappear, since they are just links on remote instances.
A copy of all the accounts, comms, posts and comments stay on any instance around to recive them, but they are not fetchable.
They probably get harvested and sold to some data broker for use in training another shitty ai model.
They don’t need to shut down for that.
This isn’t reddit. Thatxs not what we do here.
Not like we can stop it. If it’s online and not behind some kind of auth it’s getting slurped.
Pretty naive to think someone isn’t doing it already, but as someone else said you don’t need to shutdown for it. Infact it is worse if you shut down as you don’t get new data.
For a practical test, search for kbin.social (and then ctrl+f for it also to get the direct results). Or, just look at a community: !kbinMeta@kbin.social
The only thing that appears missing is the avatars. Though I assume this content is doomed in the long-run when it comes to new instances, as I doubt re-federation (3rd-party federation) is a thing. Unless of course, someone manually crossposts said content.
When Yiffit shutdown, Wander archived everything. Though I am not sure how or where… But it kinda tells me that without manually doing something with it, it will probably be lost.
Can’t log in to the instance, or make new top level posts, but navigating directly to an old link still apparently works and you can reply and everything. 🤷🏻♂️
Keep in mind these are only visible to users of your instance.
oh good point (and not entirely obvious).
Piefed has a community migration feature: piefed.social/post/667044
Basically, find the piefed.social copy of your community and then look for the ‘move to piefed.social’ link in the sidebar.
They will still be visible to federated instances as they have a local copy. But any new posts or comments will not federate.
Well, there won’t be any new posts, so that’s not all that much of a problem in the end.
You can actually make a new post on an instance that has closed, you can also reply to posts on a closed instance
Ah that makes sense. So federation implies copying essentially, and not merely linking. Thanks!
And any new instance will not have a copy.
I am in no way techy, but from what I gather because the posts are federated they are also stored on the other instances as well, so posts are still visible. In the post announcing the shuttering of .ee they specifically mentioned adding a note on your profile to link to your new profile, so people can find your new profile after that shut down. That implies to me that everything not intentionally scrubbed remains open/visible long after the shut down of the original source.
Again, though, not techy, so I may be vocalizing from my posterior
TinyLittlePuni@lemmy.world 10 months ago
My guess is that the posts and comments will still be visible but if you click on a username or a post it’ll just redirect you to an error page