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.
Heya, I’m the admin for infosec.pub, along with a bunch of other fediverse instances including infosec.exchange. I’ve been on the fediverse for a long time - infosec.exchange turns 8 next month, for example.
With each event that disenfranchises people (twitter bought by Musk, Reddit API, etc), I’ve seen a big surge in new instances. My observation is that many people get into running multi-user instances without really understanding what it takes, time-wise, emotionally, and financially.
Some of the software, like lemmy, but also kbin, calckey, and others, get pushed into the spotlight before they’re really in a reasonable spot to support the incoming community. Lemmy is relatively well functioning and complete, but only around a core set of use cases, whereas some of the others were just nowhere near ready.
I don’t know of anything on the lemmy roadmap to add account portability.
In any event, I’m here for the long term, though I do have to keep reminding our user base that this service is free to use, but not free to run, and therefore donations are much appreciated though not mandatory.
For this same reason (free to use but not free to run), I contribute to Jerry’s efforts AND to my local mastodon instance. Thanks for all you do Jerry. And your security podcast. And your pics of your orchids.
Thank you so much for your support. It is always good to hear from people that appreciate the podcast and orchid pics. I don’t get a lot of feedback so it’s nice to hear.