Is it done by majority vote or does one instance have more control than others cough cough lemmy world cough if so then this is not really federated is it and with each instance we now have basically upgraded mod power to admin power so one more question is each instance independently monetized?
This is quite a hard question to follow, but I will try to answer what I think you are saying. Each instance is it’s own site. On my instance, the server connects to other instances and copies the posts and comments across to my instance.
Every instance has at least one admin, and they have control over who their own instance federates with. There is no central server and no central decision making. If lemmy.world wants to defederate from lemmyf.uk, they can. If beehaw wants to defederate from lemmy.world, they can.
A user from lemmy.world will not see posts or comments from lemmyf.uk. A user on beehaw will not see posts from lemmy.world. Or vice versa. However, if there is a post on lemmy.ml, a user on lemmyf.uk might comment on it. Users on lemmy.world will not see it, but users on other instances will see it. A lemmyf.uk user and a beehaw.org user might have a conversation on a post on lemmy.ml, all the while lemmy.world users will not see it.
Basically, every instance decides for itself (it’s admins decide), and any content from defederated instances will not be copied to that instance. But they will be copied to other instances just fine.
At the moment, virtually every lemmy instance is either funded through donations, or from the pocket of the person running it.
What would happen if one of the larger instances goes away? Can the content be archived and preserved through the federation?
Yes
If an instance is nuked off the planet, anything federated in the past can be accessed from wherever else the content was sucessfully federated to
Does this also help with rollbacks? Beehaw had one last weekend that lost a few hours worth of content
But what about advertising I shouldve clarified that, does each instance have their own independant income through ads?