If so, should I edit all my posts/comments and update them to generic hosting links?
I’ll use postimages.org in the future to prevent something like this from happening again.
Shouldn’t they be federated permanently with other instances?
No. If you look at the URL of any meme community, its hosted on the instance of the OP, not your instance.
Yea but the posts still exist on any other instance that was federated with OPs, right?
The post will remain, but the image would be gone.
Let me give you an example. I’m gonna attach an image in this comment, I want you to see this comment, acknowledge seeing it, then I’ll go to my profile and delete the image without deleting this comment, and you can check what happens when I delete the image.
Okay!
I would say use ai to generate you a script that download all the images in the instance
well, my instance makes a local copy of posted images… so when i moved bertstrips it uses my local copy of those images.
i guess it depends on where your communities end up
Jesus, so much to unpack there. I love it.