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Major communities would be lost if any site decides to shutdown.

Yes, I agree. But coming from Reddit, which is centralised and for profit, they have to ensure that their servers run full time.

On the open source side, i.e., here at Lemmy, anyone can build an instance. Which is great for a lot of reasons. But, hypothetically let’s say I have an instance and I can’t bear up the cost of running the server. I would like to close the server down and there exists communities with thousands of users. Then what?

I know it’s easier to spring the communities back up, but it’s just starting again from scratch, and also losing all the important information that had been posted on it.

EDIT: Also what about profiles that were made on that instance? Well the data would be completely lost right?

That’s interesting. If a server goes down or the admin shuts it down for whatever reason, some major communities will be lost. Is it supposed to be like this or am I missing something?

There should be a migrating feature for profiles IMO. Would really help with speed if the server is hosted near to you.