What happens to my account if the instance I'm using so happens to shut down? Do I lose the account or is there a way to "transfer" it to a different instance?

Psythik@lemm.ee to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 83 points –
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That's the case when an instance just straight up shuts down, right?

But if a user deletes their comment this also gets propagated to other instances. Do instance admins have a nuke button to initiate a delete for all content?

I am curious when an instance completely shuts down if comments fade over time to deleted or stay archived and what dictates comments staying or disappearing.

When I looked in my inbox of all replies I saw a vlemmy comment, which showed deleted. I had replied to it too, but that getting deleted made my response not be publicly visible. Only searched it out because was in a comment in a thread where I asked from anime recommendations and had started watching their recommendation then wondered where the comment had gone.

Without knowing the actual implementation:

I'd wager comments are preserved and don't get cleaned up over time. Because if content gets deleted the instance has to federate the deletion to other instances to clean everything up (like an event system). If the instance just vanishes there would be no deletion request happening.

If deletion was automatic when an instance goes down we'd have already lost thousands of comments due to the outages lately :)

Is there vlemmy comments and communities still viewable on other instances? I wonder if that vlemmy user had deleted the comment then before the instance itself went down.