Because of the nature of federation posts and comments on LemmyNSFW communities will live on basically forever. However the photos and videos will likely be lost. Some were links to external media and will stick around, some may be cached. But most photos and videos that were uploaded directly to the instance will break when the server fully goes down.

For example: [NSFW, OBVIOUSLY] !boobs@lemmynsfw.com - that link should load fine on your instance. It should look functional just with no new posts. (Note: it's actually possible to post and comment in these communities still, but only people in your instance will see it)

The images are served from links like these: (mild NSFW) https://lemmynsfw.com/pictrs/image/d50379d3-7d64-440c-bcf6-13dbf2b81c1b.webp?format=webp

The fact that the images still load is a somewhat hopeful sign. The server is still running, Lemmy just crashed. There's still time for the head admin to come back, the data still exists. This seems unlikely though as the other admin says they haven't heard from them since October.

So there's a small window to archive this stuff, if you're interested. Between now and whenever the media server crashes or gets shut off for non-payment.

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[–] mrmaplebar@fedia.io 2 points 8 hours ago

Porn angle notwithstanding, if nothing else, this should be taken as a sign of the fragility of the Fediverse, and a warning that server communities which are only administrated by a single person (who could get hit by a bus at any time) can disappear in an instance. In order to make the Fediverse more robust against stuff like this, we really need servers and communities to have at least 2 admins with the necessary level of access for handling unforeseen circumstances. A single person going MIA randomly shouldn't be enough to take down an entire Fediverse instance. (I saw something similar happen with kbin, when one day the site just... went down!)

Now when it comes to the porn side of this, this is also kind of bad news for Fediverse adoption since there are a lot of sex/porn/kind-related communities on Reddit, and now we are kind of without a lot of that stuff.