It does highlight a potential problem with the way the fediverse functions, if too many communities are controlled by a single instance. The fediverse was meant to allievate centralisation, but in reality it has only slightly alleviated it (at least for some instances).
How big a percentage of lemmy would be lost if the lemmy.world servers was disconnected in the same way for example?
Depends on what “percentage of Lemmy” means, but they have probably something like 20% of active users. Most of their communities have analogues elsewhere.
I do think that as Lemmy grows the idea of a “general purpose instance” will go away and online communities will form their own instances.
It does highlight a potential problem with the way the fediverse functions, if too many communities are controlled by a single instance. The fediverse was meant to allievate centralisation, but in reality it has only slightly alleviated it (at least for some instances).
How big a percentage of lemmy would be lost if the lemmy.world servers was disconnected in the same way for example?
Agreed. To maintain health there needs to be a easy way to backup and migrate communities and user profiles between instances.
Without this theres just 1000 single points of failure rather than one.
Either that or communities should be able to propagate across instances.
Not by default, but there should at least be a way to treat it like a hot fail over if the instance admin chooses to enable it.
Depends on what “percentage of Lemmy” means, but they have probably something like 20% of active users. Most of their communities have analogues elsewhere.
I do think that as Lemmy grows the idea of a “general purpose instance” will go away and online communities will form their own instances.