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.