For kbin in particular, what would happen to an instance’s Magazines(subreddits), the communities would just go poof?
I’m a rat who left the sinking ship that is reddit and I want to better understand how the whole fediverse thing works. I get that “everyone can host their own instances and access the federated fediverse servers/instances”, but if a particular large one has gained traction and would one day implode, is there any way to prevent/mitigate it?
A question: let’s say something illegal is posted; like a naked image of someone aka revenge porn and that person would like it removed. Does that mean contacting every admin for each server ?
From my understanding, posts are only stored on the servers they are posted on (ie. when you view a beehaw post on kbin you are actually requesting the file from beehaw’s servers). So then you would only need to contact the admins of the server the offending content is posted on.
When you create a new post it is first saved on your instance (where your user is registered). Then your post will be pushed to all other instances (servers) where any user has registered the magazine (sub) you are posting to. The instances will then save the post to their database.
If you want a post to be deleted you have to contact the administrator of the original instance (as you said). once the post is deleted there, a delete message should be pushed to all other instances that received the post. The instances will then also delete the post to their database.
So it acts as a mirror if a user here is subscribed to that instance, but that mirror would also reflect a take down by an admin. There’s no protection of content possible.
It’s more of a “this was deleted, we suggest you do it too”. Ultimately it’s open source so anyone can modify this stuff to their liking and individual instances can choose to go along with a delete suggestion or not.
You should theoretically also be able to tag something as deleted but only actually delete it after a week (for example). This would comply with regular delete suggestions and keep things synchronized as one would expect but would give a bit of time to defend against an instance going rogue and self destructing.
Instance migration would definitely be a useful feature.
I remember reading a similar question regarding mastodon and the answer was that the code is open source, every instance, server, community can download a copy of it and customize their experience. The Kbin admin or anyone else does not own all the servers that host the vast number of instances. So even if they were to sell the already open source code, or threaten to pull the plug on the project, the code is available for everyone to just continue like nothing happened, and for the community to take over and develop it how they see fit.
Yes, the code for Kbin, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. is open source, so anyone can spin up a new instance if they want. However, spinning up a new instance of Kbin would not save the content of any other instance if it were to go down.
If kbin.social shuts down tomorrow, then all the communities and user accounts that are hosted there are gone too. Kbin would still exist because there are other instances, but nothing @kbin.social would exist, if that makes sense.
