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] [email protected] - 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.
My plan was actually to sell accounts to creators for a relatively small fee, and either not sign up free users at all or set up a separate service for free accounts. For the porn one it’d be asking the creators to pay a small fee so they could own their own distribution. Other people could obviously see the content, and creators could interact with lemmynsfw and anywhere else. But by selling accounts it would give them a space where they could interact with the fediverse and know that they are hosted on a thing that is actually paid for without advertising. They can’t get kicked off if they’re the intended users.
It’d also be a way to get funding into paying someone (me) to work on fixing the issues they had in the various fediverse services. That’s how things get built, and bugs get fixed. I care about improving the fediverse and was pursuing a path to get some more funding for it.
Not everything has to be provided for free for it to be a good thing.