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?
Lemmy is instanced. if the host “dies” everthing else dies with it. even the accounts and everything. as far as i understand it. maybe there will be a few cached posts from that instance but im not sure about that.
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.
Everything dies.
The existence itself doesn’t.
Are you sure about that?
Yes, 51%
From memory posts are partially archived by Google’s cache, so if they’re indexed correctly people should still be able to search for something and have it as a result? Unsure if that would work if the whole domain is actually gone though
Exactly, this is why things like stack overflow never came into existence.
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.
In what world is 40 years “young”?
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.
I haven’t bothered playing with instances yet I just made my account yesterday. I need another account if I leave lemmy.world?
If lemmy.world dies, you’re account goes down along with it. You would then need to find a new instance and make a new account.