this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I feel like storage would fill up quite fast if that were the case
On the one hand, yeah you’re right. But large social media actually work the same way. Reddit will run hundreds of servers and keep a copy of the data on every server. It’s one of the easiest ways to scale. Except with Federation, it’s not a single company running those servers.
I guess the only true way to be certain of things in the federated world is to run your own instance and connect to other instances. Ultimately I do plan to do this with a few things, primarily moving myself off Mastodon.social and onto my own self-install on my own domain, the goal being that I'd have no other users beyond accounts for each of my music monikers and a 'personal' one. I'd love to have a books.mydomain.com instance of BookWyrm too if I can muster the enthusiasm to set it up.
Of course, you can, in theory, also sign up to an instance and then move to another instance. I know there are guides for this portability when it comes to Mastodon, but not sure how it works for things like Lemmy and BookWyrm.
It does, and a lot of Fediverse servers shut down after about two months once the admins realize how much data storage they're committing to!
It's not like every server backs up everything, though. A server only backs up activities performed by actors that are least one actor on the server is subscribed to.