This apparently is a problem on Mastodon. But, the Forumverse (PieFed/Lemmy/MBin) has a design that mitigates this.

See for example the case of lemm.ee. It went down. Yet, here's an example of its content being live and (somewhat) kicking: https://lemmy.world/c/movies@lemm.ee .
Their closure was known before, so communities names were appropriately changed.

How the Forumverse works is that each instance that has at least one user subscribed to a comm makes a full copy of all of the comm's text material whenever something gets published there. What, however, goes missing is the ability to propagate the content between instances. That would be the job of lemm.ee, in this case. If you now go and write a comment at https://piefed.social/c/movies@lemm.ee , it will never be visible when viewed from within other instances. In other words, whatever you comment there, will not be visible on https://lemmy.world/c/movies@lemm.ee, because you are not a user of lemmy.world and nobody's there to federate the content.

I wish Forumverse comms had some kind inheritance tag so that a comm could tell what instance should gain the right/responsibility to do the federation work if the comm's original instance is confirmed to have gone belly-up. If that was done, comm's would be essentially eternal. Now it's a bit of a weird situation that you have comms that look completely existant and where it looks like you can even comment, but the comments won't propagate anywhere.

But the content is still there. If you subscribe to a community, it means all of that community's text content (but not images!) will be backed up on your home instance's server.

> @auster@thebrainbin.org said in Are people backing up the fediverse?: > > Are people backing up the fediverse?

Threadiverse people: yes that's a good idea. Also this is already done because of how the threadiverse works.

Microblog people: are you insane that's a violation of my privacy. You're not allowed to scrape my public posts. *blocks*

I wonder if backing up the fediverse is a good idea. I have a mixed opinion about it. I think not all data should be saved. I believe we can delete them after 3-5 years.

There is no point on keeping every stuff we created there. Maybe for history purpose on how we lived here ? On old computer ? On good photo and memory ? Nostalogia ?

Dunno...internet and memory from past is an interesting topic.

Edit: typo

I think stuff is getting backed up or collected somewhere either way. With the way federation works, anyone can spin up an instance and just store whatever they want from the instances they are federated with regardless of intent, malicious or not.

The fediverse is approximately the part of the Internet that is least in need of anyone actively backing it up.

After all, all messages here are copied to many servers, each of them already serves as a backup. One more backup doesn't make much of a difference.

I don't, I use it mostly as write only. But for things I do want to keep I have a blog and post it there and just cross post to PieFed.

@Auster @NorskSud archive.org has a wonderful permanent s3-compatible API which would be great for this.

https://archive.org/developers/ias3.html

I bet @internetarchive would help out with this if software developers or administrators wanted to use it.