So I’ve gone with kbin over lemmy for now, folks seem pretty friendly here.
Main question:
I understand that the point of the Fediverse is (relatively) easy access to decentralized communities. But what happens if the folks in charge of an instance decide they want to close it?
If ernest suddenly decides he wants to close kbin, is all the content just lost? Do we have ways to migrate the content/users/everything?
Even the reddit blackout was noticeably “someone else says you can’t have this anymore” so I’m a little more sensitive to this than normal lol.
I realize we’re in the early stages of the Fediverse, so it may just be a matter of patience while the smart people figure it out lol. But instance-death or long-term community-blackout seems like a risk across the whole fediverse!
Followup question:
If I post content, should I be basically spreading it across several instances to ensure my contributions aren’t lost when someone else closes up shop?
The content hosted on the site will be gone. with the mastodon stuff they already have a way to download your content and be able to reupload it on another instance (migrating). but that isn’t a thing for lemmy/kbin just yet.
notably, beehaw just announced they’re defederating from lemmy.world so go check that drama if you wanna see what happens.
Yeah if all your posts are on a single instance, then naturally when that instance closes that’s going away lol. the nature of the fediverse is federation and decentralization so you should just post freely to various instances as you please.
I don’t think you can reupload content, at least not yet. I recently migrated off of home.social, and there wasn’t any way to upload the resulting data export at my new Mastodon instance.