Federated data tends to be ephemeral. None of the fediverse sites claim to store everything that they’ve ever gotten there or federated to them. As such, the federation structure tends to perform poorly as a durable store of knowledge.

The oldest posts on many Mastodon have been lost to database expiration. This too will happen on Lemmy. There is no guarantee with federation that content will be available and searchable a year or two or ten down the road.

If you then say “ahh, but I’ve stood up an instance that has lots of disk storage and can serve it as an authoritative source for future visitors…” then we’ve lost federation and are back to a centralized server.

For federated Q&A, beyond saying “it’s federated” - what is the use case for federation? Why federation? How is moderation and curation done?