• marsara9@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    1 year ago

    Short answer – nothing.

    Longer answer – Those communities, posts and comments will still exist on the other servers, but sadly interacting with them will not federate that data to other instances anymore, since the host instance is no longer active.

      • emptyother@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        We got to see exactly what would happen a week ago when Beehaw defederated from lemmyworld. For us (on lemmyworld) it was like if that server had disappeared. Comments from beehaw stayed on the list, but new content from them (comments or posts) didnt show.

      • marsara9@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yep, but if you reply to said post, only other users on YOUR instance will see those comments. Any other instance and it would be like you didn’t reply at all.

        • lorcster123@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          OK thanks. I am still a bit confused at how it works tho, if they did nuke the website, where would the data from the post and comments be stored

          • marsara9@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            So trying to not go into the technical details too much but when two instances federate with each other, they literally share all of the community, post and comment data with all other federated servers. But it’s the job of the host do manage that passing of data.

            Now once the host decides to go offline, that activity of informing all other instances of “hey here’s something new about XYZ community!” no longer happens, but each instance still has the historical data from prior to them going offline. So you can still see that old data and still technically reply to it. Just that the host won’t tell other instances that you did reply.

            • marsara9@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              Replying to my own post with an example…

              Lets assume you have an account on Lemmy.world. Let’s also assume you see some post on Lemmy.ml. And finally lets assume you have a friend that’s actually on Mastodon. When you reply to that post on Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world sends your reply to Lemmy.ml and then Lemmy.ml tells Mastodon (and all other federated instances) about your reply. But if Lemmy.ml decides to go offline, Lemmy.world has no where to send that reply to, so it’s only kept locally on Lemmy.world. The user on Mastodon can’t see it as their instance wasn’t told about it from Lemmy.ml as it went offline.

            • emptyother@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              1 year ago

              I assume its only text content that is shared between servers? Not uploaded images and the like?

              • marsara9@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Correct. Images are actually hosted on a separate service along side the instance itself. So if said instance goes offline, all of the images go along with it (unless you linked to lmgur or something else instead).

            • lorcster123@lemmy.worldOP
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              1 year ago

              So lets say lemmy.world and then lets take beehaw.org (I know they are defederated lets assume they are not) for example. All the posts and comments which are hosted by lemmy.world on hard drives or servers, are also hosted by beehaw.org and vice versa? So the amount of data is actually doubled in size?

              • marsara9@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                Yep. Add in a 3rd instance and now you have 3 copies of the database, essentially. It’s just that each instance is responsible about telling the fediverse when updates occur to communities on their instance.

                • lorcster123@lemmy.worldOP
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  If the fediverse gets really big, lets say the size of reddit, it may be hard for all the different instances to store all that data on their servers

                  • marsara9@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    0
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Ya, ActivityPub isn’t without it’s issues… but luckily it’s all just text. Much of that can be compressed significantly.

    • Cloudless ☼@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      But the host can initiate a request to delete the data from other federated instances. This will be handled automatically unless the other instances specifically block/stop the deletion request.

      Am I right?

      • marsara9@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        In theory ya, an admin could remove/delete the communities, posts and/or comments and then let that data federate out, and they would then be hidden on all of the other servers. But there’d be nothing stopping someone from still replying or creating new posts while that’s going on.

        I could be wrong but I don’t think there’s a mass delete tool for the admins.