this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Lemmy
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This is one of many reasons I tell people not to become overly attached to their Lemmy accounts. You don't know what or who's hosting your instance and it could just abruptly disappear overnight.
Honestly this is part of the reason I’ve been thinking of spinning up my own instance. Literally just so I have control of the instance my account belongs to.
That is why I did it! Not only for, let’s say, a service that stops, but also for the case where an Admin would decide to go in a direction I don’t want to go.
I'm hoping one day we'll have federated account management as part of the Fediverse so that you don't have to spin up a whole Lemmy instance and can create communities that are attached to that.
It will be good when there is an easy way to back up and restore your subs, your blocks and possibly even your comments. If you wish to change instances, it should be easy.
This would be great. I get the value of having instances be separated but starting over is a real pain.
Maybe something about account creation: create the account only for this instance or create it for all/select number of instances? Even something like 5-10 instances “holding onto” your account could prevent things from disappearing without warning unless something really bad went down.
Spitballing here, since my understanding of how this works is ehhhhhhhhh…
The problem with hosting your own instance is that you can't create a community in another one.
And since they are a central aspect of Lemmy, your experience can still suffer if the instance with one of your favorite communities goes belly up.
Ideally communities should be fully distributed (i.e. not tied to a specific instance) to avoid these issues. Unfortunately, that would lead to its own series of challenges.