The tech giants make enough money that they could keep on growing forever, from my understanding.
But the fediverse? Sure the main instances that get enough funding are going to be okay, but what about the single-user instances 10 years from now on when there’s a lot more content to download? Won’t they go bankrupt just by trying to annex the big instances?
And I have the impression that the lemmy giants are going to change over time: does that mean that 50 years from now on, the posts I’m posting here today might get lost in time because the instances that annex it will have shut down by then?
I probably misunderstand how the fediverse works, but what my worry is that the small instances won’t be able to hold an ever-growing amount of data forever?
I spoke in absolutes for the sake of readability, but I’m as in-the-dark as can be.
Smaller instances don’t grab everything from every other server, it only grabs data from other servers when their users are subscribed to specific communities, also I suspect it doesn’t grab all historical data automatically (though I don’t know how much it does grab by default)
Right now there’s no migration tool for when instances shut down, but it should be technically possible someone just needs to implement it.
It doesn’t get everything. At least it’s not what kbin is doing, and I expect lemmy is the same. How it works for kbin is, once you subscribe you will start getting info about ANY change. A like, comment or anything like that.
So, someone likes a comment, anywhere on any instance. We’ll get sent that like. But we don’t have the comment. So, we fetch the comment. But, wait this one was a comment on a previous comment. So we’ll fetch that too. All the way to the post. Also any users involved (the liker, and commenters back to original poster) will also be fetched. The hierarchy to the comment that was liked is then built, and then the like itself is applied.
That’s why you will start to see a lot of old posts, but not all of them. It’s just going to slowly build up over time as people interact and of course you’ll get anything new.
Even with this I’m getting a LOT of content right now delivered.
EDIT: Not sure why I posted without finishing typing before.
I see, that clears up a lot, thank you! I just hope that Lemmy is, as you suspect, doing the same as kbin.