That part won’t change. If your current instance was federated with an obscure community/instance before that community/instance disappeared, then you will still have the content from back then and will be able to find the discussion and solution
That still works with replication. What won’t work is having any discussion going forward be replicated over all replications. But the replication works fine for archival purpouses.
How often do you revisit forum posts you made in 2007? Some content doesn’t need to be preserved
It’s not about visiting a forum post I made in 2007. It’s about visiting a forum post about an obscure issue that someone solved in 2007.
relevant XKCD
That part won’t change. If your current instance was federated with an obscure community/instance before that community/instance disappeared, then you will still have the content from back then and will be able to find the discussion and solution
Even if my instance never interacted with that instance?
Well no, but then you weren’t going to find it anyway, even if the other instance was still around
That still works with replication. What won’t work is having any discussion going forward be replicated over all replications. But the replication works fine for archival purpouses.
It would certainly be nice to replace stack overflow with a good Lemmy instance, but have the data guaranteed to remain around.