Here’s an analogy, hope it helps:
Kbin.social and beehaw.org are like really advanced email servers (e.g. outlook.com, gmail.com)
The content you’re seeing on kbin is like viewing an email sent from another server, in the case of this thread you’re getting content from beehaw.org.
These aren’t just normal emails, they’re super advanced emails with comments, replies, categories, votes etc.
The content is downloaded to the kbin servers for your viewing pleasure, and you can send an ‘email’ back to beehaw by engaging in their posts/communities like you’re doing now. That will send what you’ve done back to beehaw so it’s all synced up for their users.
If beehaw ever goes down/gets unlinked from kbin you’ll still have the old ‘emails’ (content) but you won’t be able to engage with them anymore. Like if someone deleted their email account it doesn’t delete all the emails they sent to other people.
I have a vision of what’s to come so I’ll throw it out here.
When things truly take off there’ll likely be companies selling cloud hosted instances, the server requirements aren’t massive for a small group so it’ll be cheap.
That’d solve the issue of losing accounts or small communities, but huge communities would have to be hosted on huge servers just to handle the amount of content coming in.
Which means money will play a role somehow, imagine a community with millions of visitors every day. Could a server relying on donations sustain that? Or better question is could they sustain that better than a huge tech conglomerate?