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 will still be visible to federated instances as they have a local copy. But any new posts or comments will not federate.
Ah that makes sense. So federation implies copying essentially, and not merely linking. Thanks!
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
Nothing I was ever subscribed to, and why not post a direct link to the community?
I just made a post and a comment on a community on a closed instance. Both went through okay, but will never federate.
And any new instance will not have a copy.
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
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.
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.
Not like we can stop it. If it’s online and not behind some kind of auth it’s getting slurped.
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.socialThe only thing that appears missing is the
avatarsimages. Though I assume the text 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.Piefed has a community migration feature: https://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.
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.
Then again, the other day someone had replied to a post on a community on Yiffit. 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. 🤷🏻♂️
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).