What happens to the posts and comments made in an instance if that instance shuts down?

neocamel@lemmy.studio to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 33 points –
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It's not about visiting a forum post I made in 2007. It's about visiting a forum post about an obscure issue that someone solved in 2007.

This is so stupidly relevant to strange motherboard problems. I hope that lemmy is able to be scraped by web crawlers to help assist with these sorts of problems in the future.

That part won't change. If your current instance was federated with an obscure community/instance before that community/instance disappeared, then you will still have the content from back then and will be able to find the discussion and solution

Even if my instance never interacted with that instance?

Well no, but then you weren't going to find it anyway, even if the other instance was still around

I would argue the instance still gets indexed by Google and if it was around I could Google search for the result.

Ok, but in that instance, unless that niche instance that disappeared never federated with anyone, then their content is going to be available on the instances they did federate with before they went away, and those will continue to show in google

It would certainly be nice to replace stack overflow with a good Lemmy instance, but have the data guaranteed to remain around.

That still works with replication. What won't work is having any discussion going forward be replicated over all replications. But the replication works fine for archival purpouses.