People, if an instance is crumbling, sign up to another instance! When you are able to use lemmy.world again, use lemmy2opml/lemmy_migrate (or any other tool that works, there’s a list on the Awesome Lemmy Github page) to migrate your followed communities to the new instance.
I don’t think the problem is much on the identification side, but on the communities one
Like, I can’t access any community on .world while the instance is down
You actually can, you just append @lemmy.world to the community name when accessing from another instance that’s federated with lemmy.world and once lemmy.world comes back up your contributions will be there. Any instance that’s federated with the instance your posting from will be able to participate in the discussion with you for that matter. The only thing you can’t do with a community when the host instance is down is subscribe to it. It would still get added to your subscriptions though if you try, the hosting insurance just won’t know until it comes back up and eats through the outboxes of federated instances to “catch up”.
Edit When it does come back up it’ll also get any messages that are in federated outboxes as well so your posts will ultimately show up on the host instance, just posted by your alt account
wait so how does this work on a technical level?
say I am part of a community of /c/weirdstuff that’s on lemmy.world.
if lemmy world is down how do my comments get to lemmy.world? are they stored on whatever instance I am registered on and then synced to lemmy.world once it’s up?