I'm confused why backups would even matter. Are the servers physically hosted in Mali and the government seized them?
Because if the government just invalidated the domain, that's completely different. In that case a server device with everything on it still exists in the same place it always did, it's just DNS that has changed.
(And yes, I understand that losing the domain name and the certs attached to it would be a big deal, but there's no data loss, hence no need to pull from backups.)
And maybe some configs. Letsencrypt is great but SSL is still kinda a hastle
Edit: oh and if Lemmy has any sort of like unique IDs for usernames at a given domain. Could be something on the backend that keeps a unique I'd for each user encountered in the event a user migrates between servers. Mastodon notifies me if someone migrates.
Well, to begin with we didn't even know what the heck happened, so being aware that our data is safe is one big relief.
I don't remember the name of another growing instance that just disappeared (different issue I guess) I don't recall that their users ever got their data back again.