like if i post on a community in instance A and my instance goes down will people still see the post?
Data needed to display your content is shared, “personal” data such as your IP address is only visible for your own instance though.
posts are replicated to other systems via a broadcast-like subscription mechanism. each receiving system stores their own copies of content. as long as the remote system received the post and did not receive a ‘delete’ command, it would be available.
does this mean that an instance could store deleted content it it wanted to?
Yes, it also seems that the “delete” do not federated that well, and may come late.
However, on proprietary social media, d deleted posts are just “hidden”, and there is various way to see deleted, moderated posts.
Despite laws like"right to be forgotten" and GDPR, assume that once you posted something on Internet it’ll be there forever. Not a big deal if it’s a graduation picture, or your time at last week end Marathon. More annoying if it’s nude or a rant about “lazy immigrants stealing our jobs to get welfare”
oh i know that, just never really considered the ramifications of federating social media.
As I said, this issues also exists on “centralized social media” see for example that story https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-bug-resurfaced-fix-icloud/
No Idea whether apple’s term of service involve letting them use your photo to train their IA
Remote instances make their own copy of anything sent to them, so visibility isn’t affected by whatever happens on the original server.
You can see for yourself by visiting something like /c/headphones@lemmy.film (that instance died ages ago)
neat!