this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Huh. Well that just makes no sense structurally. Thanks for pointing it out though.
How does this thing work at all? You would expect it to all be hosted to the site the community is hosted on. So now when a comment thread is fetched, it has to go to all these other servers for every single comment from another instance. This is actually mind-boggling.
Does anyone have an ELI5 for why it's done this way?
Actually, the post content is saved on the instance where the post is posted as well. That post is called a copy, the original resides on the poster's originating instance. But, not the media, no, that resides on the instance where the poster resgistered.
https://lemmy.world/comment/20357
Breaking out old reliable. This comment has taught many Lemmings in its time
Basically everything goes through your instance. If you make a post, it goes to the copy of the community that's on your instance. Likewise if you comment. If you join a community, your instance starts listening for changes and stores those on the instance.
That way if another instance goes down, you still have a copy of all of the content there that someone on your instance is interested in. So that way pretty much everything is backed up.
I personally think we can do better, but it's an easy enough system that all but guarantees that content doesn't disappear. You could even set up an instance that never deletes anything if you want to make sure you don't lose any data.