a copy will be on other instances, but it won’t sync between the other instances.
It depends on if the shutdown process is followed - if the server just goes down, all the connected instances won’t remove the data…
If it’s followed correctly the destructing instance should send a signal to all known instances to remove the data.
Or at least that how I heard it works… Have to look at the documentation to know for sure
and what happens when the home instance comes back online? Do the posts on the local instances sync?
I think the instances will sync with the home instance when they can?
and all the posts that were made in the other instances will be added to the home instance, which will then pass it along to all the other instances? interesting.
that’s quite literally what happened here on kbin at least. we had some old posts from lemmy instances before the influx of people happened and defederation stopped. the subs were “dead” and didn’t update from others. once federation started up again, everything got synced/updated. I imagine the same would happen if the host instance went down for whatever reason.
Just like email, a copy of the emails are on other servers. But you can’t create new emails going to or from that server.
I’m still pretty new but I believe federation works like syncing. You can see that at Beehaw, they defederated Lemmyworld so any communities from lemmyworld are still visible, but no longer updated.
Edit: I should mention it’s not exactly like syncing, because federation won’t sync backwards in time (for example is A defederated from B for three days, when they refederate they will see new posts but not what they missed in those three days.)
But if they stay federated then the copy should be mostly identical in terms of content.
Thanks, It made it much easy to understand.
