Do they get adopted by other instances? Are they still accessible from other instances? Can you still post on them from another instance?
Edit: From my understanding every instance that deals with a community has a cached copy. Will that copy disappear after a certain time, because it can’t phone to home anymore?
This is going to make it impossible for any technical help communities to take root. The fact that the whole thing can just go poof completely turns me off from using something like that.
I understand what you’re saying, but I feel more concerned with the stability of instances due to the fact that they’re run by everyday people as something to do, they already have lives and jobs outside of this. Maybe it’s a passion project they pour a lot into, but the possibility of it crashing down for various reasons is a lot higher than a larger centralized service run by companies whose soul purpose is to run that service.
It’ll never happen, centralised means stable. Just check out what this company called Google have built!
They are currently working hard to discontinue your favourite Google service.
I get the concern, but long term persistence is probably a rarity. The internet is still young. If anything a federated group of communities that are linked somehow will last far longer than a single server of even a large corporation. For the weeks that Lemmy et al have been growing, how to best develop communities that connect and last has been an ongoing question.
The internet as most people know it and as companies depend on it isn’t that old.
The difference being discussed here is a single existence vs. potential for redundancy. The best way for something to outlive even the places it’s stored is by repetition. That goes against both how we’ve grown things so far on the internet as well as the talk about competition among instances and the biggest one wins. It’s far better for there to be many groups that share information in some way but are their own entities and aren’t dependent on the rest.
