Lemmy.world became the default instance during the Reddit migration, so I imagine that a lot of other instances would start jockeying for that role and to take some of those mod teams. I would expect a few months of chaos and a reduction in overall posts while the dust settles.
Lemmy.ml has been a bridge between the more normie and tankie communities on Lemmy. Without a middle ground, I see the moderation between the two groups becoming much harder.
Also, if lemmy.ml fails, it would likely mean that the developers of Lemmy have abandoned the project. If that happens, I expect several forks getting made as a new standard governing body is developed.
Unlike others, I’d expect a signicifant decline of posts as not only many users but also loads of communities would be lost. That’s why from my perspective users and communities should be evenly distributed across instances.
On top of that, there should be a feature to move entire accounts or communities to other instances. That way a community including all its members could just be migrated before a major shutdown.
Similarly, I think it would be a huge disturbance for the email system and possibly the entire internet world-wide if Gmail went down next month even though there are in theory plenty of alternative providers. Or supermarkets. If the IT of Walmart, Visa/MasterCard, Amazon AWS, Microsoft etc. have an outage it always has huge impact.
Lemmy as a whole isn’t that big and far from being critical infrastructure but we all want it to grow we should bear in mind that huge central services are always more risky than many small services.
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If lemmy’s communities were not instance bound, but cross instance, it wouldn’t be that much of a problem. People could recreate their accounts on another instance and just join the same community.
Nothing. That’s the whole point of federation.
Other instances would still be online, and it would be business as usual there.
There would likely be discussion about it on other instances, but Lemmy wouldn’t shut down just because .world or .ml went offline.
Well, not exactly nothing, the communities on them would likely move or merge somewhere else.
