Do they get adopted by other instances? Are they still accessible from other instances? Can you still post on them from another instance?
Edit: From my understanding every instance that deals with a community has a cached copy. Will that copy disappear after a certain time, because it can’t phone to home anymore?
If I understand the fediverse correctly, if the instance dies (meaning all the background servers are taken away), everything on that instance is gone; accounts, communities, posts, comments. Since the instance is the host, they are the ones holding the data; if they decide to stop, it’s gone.
However, the creator of the community and its members could create new accounts on another instance to rebuild the community.
When that’s the case, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to migrate communities, so when an adminndecides to quit an instance, those communities that want to move can arrange that move.
I agree that would be nice. Hopefully it is something that will eventually get added as a possibility, but I don’t know enough about the background workings to say if it is being considered or not.
I think it needs the ability for multiple hosts to opt in to co-hosting a community. It could work as a cache and provide some redundancy if something goes down, temporarily or permanently.
This is a great question that I also would like to understand better.
Just started learning about the fediverse but I suspect everything goes down with the ship. Sort of creates a development opportunity for community driven backup utilities, though. Interesting problems are fun development challenges :)
Lemmy is instanced. if the host “dies” everthing else dies with it. even the accounts and everything. as far as i understand it. maybe there will be a few cached posts from that instance but im not sure about that.
This is going to make it impossible for any technical help communities to take root. The fact that the whole thing can just go poof completely turns me off from using something like that.
I haven’t bothered playing with instances yet I just made my account yesterday. I need another account if I leave lemmy.world?
I’ve been wondering about this also since I started a new community in the last week and have already invested a fair amount of time into it. I’m hesitant to keep investing time and effort, though, if it can just disappear with no recourse.
