I have been thinking about it for some time and I’m concerned that if a big instance like lemmy.ml goes down does the content hosted on lemmy.ml will be deleted too or a copy of the content will be available on other instances?

  • Meseta
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    1 year ago

    I’m still pretty new but I believe federation works like syncing. You can see that at Beehaw, they defederated Lemmyworld so any communities from lemmyworld are still visible, but no longer updated.

    Edit: I should mention it’s not exactly like syncing, because federation won’t sync backwards in time (for example is A defederated from B for three days, when they refederate they will see new posts but not what they missed in those three days.)

    But if they stay federated then the copy should be mostly identical in terms of content.

    • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      1 year ago

      It depends on if the shutdown process is followed - if the server just goes down, all the connected instances won’t remove the data…

      If it’s followed correctly the destructing instance should send a signal to all known instances to remove the data.

      Or at least that how I heard it works… Have to look at the documentation to know for sure

    • gibbedygook
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      1 year ago

      and what happens when the home instance comes back online? Do the posts on the local instances sync?

        • gibbedygook
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          1 year ago

          and all the posts that were made in the other instances will be added to the home instance, which will then pass it along to all the other instances? interesting.

          • Otome-chan@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            that’s quite literally what happened here on kbin at least. we had some old posts from lemmy instances before the influx of people happened and defederation stopped. the subs were “dead” and didn’t update from others. once federation started up again, everything got synced/updated. I imagine the same would happen if the host instance went down for whatever reason.