Good evening,
I’ve begun looking into Mastodon and I think it is a great initiative and alternative to today’s siloed web!
I’m running an instance now and I’ve started following a few users on other instances. I understand the gist of how it works from seeing the “How it works” video on joinmastodon.org, but I’d like to understand it on a more technical level. When I follow users I see there are entries created in account in the database on my instance, and I see their message show up in my timeline. Are these messages pulled and stored in my instance db, or are they just fetched “real time” ? What if they delete their messages, are the deletes propagated to all other instances where there are followers? What if the instance is down?
I’d appreciate if someone can shed some more light on the nature of this!