When an instance like lemm.ee shuts down, what happens to the posts and comments?
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?
22 replies
They will still be visible to federated instances as they have a local copy. But any new posts or comments will not federate.
And any new instance will not have a copy.
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
https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
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.
That instance went down a while back, so posting a link to the community wouldn't work.
LW users can still make posts there, but they would indeed not federate.
I was just providing an example so that people could see what it would look like
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: ![email protected]The 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.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
That's pretty much it.
Every instance that was subscribed to those communities will retain their local copy of the posts/comments and remain visible. You can even still comment on them, but only users on your instance will see them (i.e. without the home instance for the community being online, they won't federate beyond your local instance).
The only hiccup is image posts. Different instances have different configs for creating local thumbnails of images, and community icons/banners aren't cached, so it'll mostly be text-only copies of the content.
And any comments or posts to other communities by
.eeusers that have images hosted on.eewill be broken.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.
@[email protected]
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.
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. 🤷🏻♂️
Keep in mind these are only visible to users of your instance.
oh good point (and not entirely obvious).
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.
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.