I assumed that once federated the public key would be remembered and signatures that do not match it would be handled, but you may be correct. I do wonder whether this could be a problem as instances close down over time. I’ll have to spend some more time researching to see if there’s a more clear answer, or if any ActivityPub implementations have their own way of handling that situation.
Yeah that’s my worry. I’m pretty sure(and could be wrong) that message/ keys are only checked on ingestion. So i would get key value for a message coming in and can check that is currently valid, not that it’s “changed” since 2 months back. I think this could allow for some one to ressurrect an old Lemmy service and masquerade as the old one… communities , users… all of it.