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?
It seems like the whole fediverse is having a lot of the same growing pains.
Discovery is still basically an impenetrable jungle. If you already know exactly what you're looking for it's fine. But I basically just wander around and happen upon neat stuff every so often lol.
And sorting content is another type of discovery problem. I'm subscribed to some interesting stuff but I need to remember to actually go check them because none of it shows up in feeds.
I'm not a programmer, so I don't know how long it takes to work out these types of issues. But I do know that I'm only still around because I'm hopeful, not because I'm actually finding it particularly useful or entertaining.
The fediverse currently feels like it might be competitive with webforums from 2010: The platform isn't doing much to help, but it's fine 'cause the people have spirit lol.