this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Sure, but here's the thing. If we all just moved to another centralized system, we'd just be setting the timer for the next heartbreak. It's a matter of when, not if.
Lemmy's growth will be slow. It may even stagnate. But, unlike Orkut, Friendster, Google+, etc. it can't be taken away from us. lemmy.ml might even shut down, but the Fediverse will always be here in one form or another.
what does it mean for people signed up on that instance?
will there be an headless profile floating around the fediverse or does it simply being deleted when the instance deletes?
The profile is deleted, and if you created content on other instances with it, that content will still exist, but they'll be headless, yes. Which IMHO, is the least of the problems. The bigger problem for me is that, although content you created on other instances should be fine, all the content on your own instance is gone. AFAIK, there's no effort to preserve content across the fediverse.
If there's no solution to mirror content between instances, as people realize that, I believe people will just resort to populating content on a few of the more popular instances, effectively getting us back to a centralized (or semi-centralized, anyway) setup.
Of course, that (E: I mean, having it hosted on less popular instances and that instance eventually shutdown) would probably not be a big deal for more niche communities, but technology, for example, is a big one - there was some people on a few tech related subs on reddit pushing for people to scrub all their comment history reasoning that this would hurt reddit, but the other side of that argument is that it would probably hurt users just as well: there's a lot of tech troubleshooting solutions nowadays that you can't find anywhere else on the internet, only on reddit. Now think about this a few years down the line - Lemmy has taken off and there's a lot of tech related content on it. Then an instance with a lot of tech related content goes under. All that content is gone too, and this time it was not even by the user's choice.
Not saying that Lemmy is not viable, though. But there are a few problems to figure out.