Trying to wrap my head around the fediverse. Is each instance like another person with a server? Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?
Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?
Sorry I’m sure I messed up some of the terminology, I hope my questions make sense! I love the idea of the fediverse as I understand it, but I like to dig into these details.
Not lost, but inactive / isolated. As I understand it, when a user on insurance A subscribes to a community, votes, or comments on a community on instance B, that content is copied to insurance A and the two instances will sync their changes together. If instance B shuts down or the two instances defederate, then the content on instance A stays intact, but it no longer syncs with the source of truth.
Okay, so does that mean you could potentially protect your own account from an instance being shutdown by making sure to subscribe to communities in other instances?
Yes, but they would be separate accounts (comments, subscribed y communities, messages, etc). I have an account on lemm.ee and lemmy.world which I actively use. It can get a bit annoying making sure that I stay subscribed to the same communities on both, but it’s also nice to get different feeds.
Another option would be to stand up your own closed instance, so your account is the only one. That way storage and bandwidth should be minimal enough that you can host at home and also have full control over settings on your instance.
So I could set up a private instance on, say, a pi and then never be at risk of losing my account? (Particularly interested in things like subscribed communities and saved posts)
In theory, yes. In practice, probably not? I don’t run an instance so I don’t know what resources you need but I suspect a pi isn’t going to be powerful enough. You’d definitely have to hook up some extra storage space at least.
You’d also still be at risk of losing your account if your hardware fails, you’d need a backup solution there too.
A pi is definitely powerful enough, the Lemmy software is super lightweight, but you’d definitely need the extra storage.