I’m very new to all of this federated stuff. One question I have is what happens to communities if a server is just taken offline without notice, indefinitely? Say the owner dies or something and they were the sole manager.
@bryan I think those communities might go down with that server. So it’s important that others spin up other instances. This doesn’t mean each community needs its own copy of every community, but some communities can exist on one server and if one goes down others can migrate. I’m looking into starting up an instance as well. Even if it’s only me on there it’s nice to know the only person who will take it down is myself 😅
Two thoughts:
1 - I think we need to live with the fact that digital permanence probably isn’t good for us, and it probably isn’t something we can count on. I think websites and communities come in cycles, so we should collectively plan for both the boom and the bust.
2 - (respected) instance admins in Mastodon have a covenant they sign that provides a bit of a backup against this scenario: more than one admin per server (or at least have another trusted individual who can step in if the admin becomes incapacitated); backups in case of data loss on a hosting provider; and I believe at least some kind of terms of service that says racism/bigotry etc will be dealt with actively. (Correct me if I’m wrong here). I think users need to look for instances on Lemmy where admins can provide a similar set of guarantees
Edit: another point - I don’t think it’s immoral if people set up bots that can clone submissions to a backup instance in case of disaster, too. But of course there probably wouldn’t be a way to take the discussions/comments
