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What actually happens to posts when a Lemmy instance shuts down? (lemdro.id)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by claim_arguably@lemdro.id to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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When I first new about lemmy, lemm.ee was among the biggest and I created an account on it but didn't use it much and didn't knew that the instance was deleted until recently. So help me understand where content is stored:

When a post is created, is it only stored on the original instance, or copied to every other one?
Do all federated servers get a copy, or get posts from other server when user demands them?
When an instance shuts down, is its content gone forever, or do other instances keep copies?
If the original server is gone, what happens to edits or deletions?
Is there any kind of “shared” storage in the Fediverse, or network that store everything?
Could one still access all lemm.ee content now? Or post in it's communities?

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[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 46 points 1 week ago

So far no one has mentioned this, but typically images or other uploads only exist on the original server. When lemm.ee went down, all the content those users uploaded was lost.

The text content of posts and comments is copied across all the linked servers, but the images aren't. Some instances will proxy images from a short term cache, but it's far too expensive to store the images permanently.