Are people backing up the fediverse?
#fediverse
Most fediverse platforms are run by common users, not entities with either monetary, commercial, political or geopolitical interests to keep the platforms alive. But that also means the instances could disappear when money gets tight, if the interest dies out, if there are technical difficulties that are hard to deal with, etc.
This brings me to the opening question, are people taking at least what they find relevant from the fediverse, and backing it up on web archival services, or at least backing up locally as screenshots, HTML/MHTML files, etc., so if their instance or the propagated contents die, at least there is a register the content ever existed?
Nope. There’s no other way to fetch those posts than to view them through some instance that already has them. Things will get saved on a Forumverse instance from the moment someone subscribes to the community.
Lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and lemmy.zip are examples of instances that have existed for a long time and are well federated. Almost anything gets backed up by them, because almost any comm has users from those instances.
So it must’ve been Mbin then. All your examples list Lemmy-powered instances, and I did pull some posts through their comments.
You can manually pull individual posts on PieFed and Lemmy as well. But at least those two don’t have a “pull the whole post history” feature per se.
Two PieFed instances do communicate the post history upon subscription. And, I think, comments as well? But PieFed cannot do that with Lemmy.