My home instance is shutting down soon.
https://lemm.ee/post/65824884.
I am slightly unclear about what the instance admin meant.
Because of how Lemmy is built, everything posted on lemm.ee will still be accessible from other instances, even after we go offline.
How are other Lemmy instance able to access the content from the post-shutdown lemm.ee?
Do all the other Lemmy instances keep a copy of the content from lemm.ee?
If so, wouldn’t that be rather taxing on each Lemmy instance? (since they have to keep a copy of all the content from all instances they federate with).
I tried reading this up by researching on Lemmy federation, but this is still unclear to me.
Federation means that when anything happens on one instance (post, comment, whatever), that instance will also inform other instances of this. Which other instances? The ones that have at least one user who has indicated they are interested in that kind of activity (on Lemmy mostly: by subscribing to the community).
So already now you can see eg my instance’s copy of a lemm.ee community at https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/[email protected] and this will not disappear just because lemm.ee goes down. It’s stored in my instance’s database. But it will no longer be possible to post or comment there because that will no longer federate to other instances.
It’s not guaranteed that all of lemm.ee will be accessible elsewhere. Some communities might not have (always had) subscribers from other instances, which would mean no other database has stored those parts.