It wasn’t like that. The owner went on a long vacation during which the server’s disk ran full, the database was corrupted as a result, and the backup was overwritten with a corrupted state, before the owner returned.

feddit.org was created as a community effort to keep that from happening again.

Plenty of others too: vlemmy.net, iusearch.fyi, lemmy.film.

That’s why people should pay attention to a few things when looking for a server

• are there at least two admins?
• are they communicating regularly, including on their finances
• is there a Matrix chat or another way to reach out to them

I’m very sad about kbin, I eve told Ernest that I’d volunteer with some admin work and potentially code (even if I despise PHP), but he declined, even when his health went really bad.

The early internet also had personal website vanishing or being abandoned all the time. Static webpages don’t need constant maintenance but it’s more noticeable when it’s a community.