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?
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
But the community itself is effectively dead, any content posted there would only appear in the posters instance and not go to everyone else.
Yepp this is an important point - completely forgot to clarify this lol.
The community would mostly only be useful as an archival source at that point, a bit like vlemmy and fmhy.ml communities now