They keep their identity. Members sign in with their own UIID, which is not owned by the network they joined. Closing your network does not take anything away from them personally.
They do not keep the network's content. Posts, conversations and shared files live in your network and its storage. If you close it, that goes with it — so give people notice and time to save what matters to them.
Where your data actually is. Files and media sit with the storage provider you configured — S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, Backblaze, Google Cloud Storage, Wasabi or FTP. That relationship is yours, and it does not disappear because you stop running the network.
If you want to step back without shutting down, consider whether someone else in the community could take it on before you close it. A community that has become genuinely useful to people is worth handing over rather than deleting.
If your reason for leaving is us, you have other options: Web4 Lite is the open-source foundation on GitHub, and Web4 @home runs a network on low-cost hardware such as a Raspberry Pi (http://pi.linkspreed.com).
Questions: [email protected].