this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
8 points (65.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43898 readers
1032 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is quite a hard question to follow, but I will try to answer what I think you are saying. Each instance is it's own site. On my instance, the server connects to other instances and copies the posts and comments across to my instance.
Every instance has at least one admin, and they have control over who their own instance federates with. There is no central server and no central decision making. If lemmy.world wants to defederate from lemmyf.uk, they can. If beehaw wants to defederate from lemmy.world, they can.
A user from lemmy.world will not see posts or comments from lemmyf.uk. A user on beehaw will not see posts from lemmy.world. Or vice versa. However, if there is a post on lemmy.ml, a user on lemmyf.uk might comment on it. Users on lemmy.world will not see it, but users on other instances will see it. A lemmyf.uk user and a beehaw.org user might have a conversation on a post on lemmy.ml, all the while lemmy.world users will not see it.
Basically, every instance decides for itself (it's admins decide), and any content from defederated instances will not be copied to that instance. But they will be copied to other instances just fine.
At the moment, virtually every lemmy instance is either funded through donations, or from the pocket of the person running it.
What would happen if one of the larger instances goes away? Can the content be archived and preserved through the federation?
Yes
If an instance is nuked off the planet, anything federated in the past can be accessed from wherever else the content was sucessfully federated to
But the community itself is effectively dead, any content posted there would only appear in the posters instance and not go to everyone else.
Yepp this is an important point - completely forgot to clarify this lol.
The community would mostly only be useful as an archival source at that point, a bit like vlemmy and fmhy.ml communities now
Does this also help with rollbacks? Beehaw had one last weekend that lost a few hours worth of content