1y ago

Whats stopping the person who created this site lemmy.world from just nuking it and deleting all the posts on it one day?

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53 comments

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but sadly interacting with them will not federate that data to other instances anymore, since the host instance is no longer active.
- So you would still be able to see the posts and their comments on other servers?
  
  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.
  
  Damn that sucks
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  I assume its only text content that is shared between servers? Not uploaded images and the like?
  
  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).
  
  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?
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  Ya, ActivityPub isn't without it's issues... but luckily it's all just text. Much of that can be compressed significantly.
  
  I wonder what the total data storage size is for all the publicly viewable content on reddit. I find it hard to even guess lol. 100TB? 10,000TB?
  
  The compressed archive of reddit from 2005.5 until 2022 is 2 TB: https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd879ddee4d0eba08aaee
  Uncompressed it is likely way larger though.
- 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?
  
  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.

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