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.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    2·
    7 days ago

    I didn’t know that. That seems to be a very bad decision.

    I would have thought there was some sort of private public key involved in instance authentication.

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      There is, but the protocol is designed that you can’t buy a domain for a month, set up a server, and then let it expire, leaving it unable to use ActivityPub for decades after because you posted a few things to Mastodon with popular usernames.

      There is public/private key authentication, but the server is queried for its current keys when verifying content. This allows lemmy.ml to forward lemmy.dbzer0.com content to any other server without knowing the private key, because the receiving server will call back to the original server (if they key is not already cached) and use the user’s public key to verify the message.

      Once the domain expires and a new person buys the domain, that new person is in charge of what keys a domain lists or not. That, combined with the fact blind key rollover is permitted, leaves it up to programmers of individual servers to decide if they accept the new keys or not (the spec says they should).