It seems like Lemmy took off 2 years ago with the announcement of Reddit’s API blocking 3rd party apps. Many instances popped up, and some disappeared equally fast. More people have now moved over since the actual announcement becoming alive.
I’m a bit new to the decentralized hosts with federation/mesh social networks on the web, and are wondering if anyone with long time experience using something like Mastodon would shine a perspective on how these services usually operate? Does popular instances suddenly disappear, resulting in people losing contact with each other? losing progress, reputation, communities and their history? Since it’s open source, and it’s meant to be run by the people, for the people. How is the stability and long-term plan for Infosec.pub? I would like to stick around this service for hopefully many years.
Most of the instances in the instance section (https://infosec.pub/instances) is gone. I would be interested to see the statistics on how long all these instances lived before they were shut down, and compare those numbers to the big instances people are signing up to.
Lastly, there seems to be no way to migrate your account to another instance [1], so long-term reliability is indeed important.
Shortly after I moved from x/shitter to Mastodon and migrated as many followers that said they were moving as well, I subscribed to an art-focused mastondon instance. It was absolutely lovely to see impressionist paintings and other great art from museums in my daily feed. Then the site closed down. The admin running it decided he’d had enough.
I still found art, but now it’s local artists posting their work. It’s lovely, but in a different way. AND I can buy copies of the art if I want. So, I guess change is inevitable. In the real world, I’m sorta glad the Cheesecake Factory and Roundtable Pizza places closed leaving places for local restaurants to take their place.
Why do I hate Cheesecake Factory so much?
Their food is terrible. And the portions are so small.
[yes, that’s a Woody Allen joke]