My home instance is shutting down soon.

https://lemm.ee/post/65824884.

I am slightly unclear about what the instance admin meant.

Because of how Lemmy is built, everything posted on lemm.ee will still be accessible from other instances, even after we go offline.

How are other Lemmy instance able to access the content from the post-shutdown lemm.ee?

Do all the other Lemmy instances keep a copy of the content from lemm.ee?

If so, wouldn’t that be rather taxing on each Lemmy instance? (since they have to keep a copy of all the content from all instances they federate with).

I tried reading this up by researching on Lemmy federation, but this is still unclear to me.

  • Xylight@lemdro.idEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    The way ActivityPub federation works, once an instance is “linked” (like lemm.ee linking with lemmy.world, lemdro.id, etc), the instance will now send them an event once a post is made or something like that.

    For example:

    • lemm.ee —links–> lemmy.world
    • lemm.ee user makes a post A
    • lemm.ee —notifies–> lemmy.world
    • lemmy.world makes a copy of post A.

    So yes, every Lemmy instance stores copies of new data from other instances once they link.