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What's to stop a single Lemmy instance from going "this is taking too much time and money to run, I'm shutting this server down"? I guess that can apply to any service, but monetization sometimes prevents that from happening. But in this case it's all volunteer work and running a server takes resources.
What happens to all the users created under that Lemmy instance?
If it happened right now, we'd need to go make new accounts on a new instance to keep accessing content. Of course, content hosted on the disappeared instance would also be gone, which is another reason spreading everyone out onto smaller instances is a good idea to avoid one central server holding 90% of the good content.
What we have on Mastodon is an easy way to migrate account from one instance to another, so I'm hopeful a similar feature will be added here in due time once the devs have everything a bit more stable. The added complication with Lemmy of course is that we'd also need a way to migrate communities or at least the content thereof, but I've seen various discussions of how that could work so it is something that they're thinking about already.
Ultimately, don't get permanently attached to content you put out on the internet, because if this sounds terrifyingly precarious to you you probably weren't online in the early 2000s when that's just sort of how things worked. Somehow we thrived anyway!
I wonder about the same thing.
All those users go away! It is a weakness of the current implementation. It happened to me shortly after I joined when VLemmy disappeared. There is work being done on that though, including the ability to export data, and an app that can synchronize accounts between multiple instances.