If a server were to be shutdown(lack of financing or any other reason) would all the content posted there be lost too?
Is there anything the admins do or can do to prevent this? Any Mastodon instance featured on the main webpage for example offers a guarantee to at least warn users months before the shutdown.
Could the content be perhaps moved to another server like mastodon people can move over their followers?
If that content got federated to other servers, it would always remain available, on those other servers. But new things couldn’t get posted.
so if the server shuts down the content remains available on the web? federation essentially makes a copy? does the url to the post also change?
Yep.
Content always has two links, the “federated link”, IE the official version, and a local link.
In the case of that server going down, the federated link wouldn’t work, but the local one would.
You can’t guarantee a third party instance is ever going to stick around, or give notice. I would assume anything you don’t have a copy of may disappear at any time.
Honestly, my advice is to run your own server and do your own backups. Then if an instance disappears, you still have the content.
i see. although, the content i was referring to werent just my own comments. i meant everything the server holds: the posts and comments on all their communities
the reason why i brought this up were concerns about preservation. often people on reddit have fantastic posts and comments with useful info which can then be rediscovered via search engines years later. on the fediverse on one hand you have more freedom from rogue admins but on the other hand it does carry more risk of the host just disappearing
Anything you see on your instance is locally copied. So if the original instance goes away, you still have your copy of the content.
so essentially any time a post is created, as many copies of that post will exist as there are instances federating with it?
what if i’m not logged in on my own instance? if the original instance goes away would that post still be discoverable through something like google?
I’m wondering the same, especially in regard of the users that registered on that instance. If there is no backup/move would the users have to start at 0 on a new instance?
Oh yes. Users definitely have to start over. Mastodon offers a move but lemmy doesn’t have it yet, maybe in the future
Well, then I better keep a personal backup of all my community subscriptions.
don’t forget about the comments you save, they’re as valuable.
Ah yes, of course, backing up the saved posts and comments too.
