Ok, but what if the instance I choose just ends suddenly? Do I understand it correctly that on each one I have to create a new account and re-subscribe to all the communities etc,?
That’s correct though account migration is planned for some point in the future, or at least noted as a desirable feature by the Devs. Maybe even linking accounts across instances?
Having to resubscribe to all your communities is annoying but I imagine third party apps could streamline that process when they get released/refined.
well this just happened with vlemmy.net, i was affected by this and had to manually resubscribe to 50 communities and recreate one, because of this someone made a tool to download your data off of lemmy and upload it to another instance https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Aside from what Coelacanth said, those instances are no more likely to shut down than lemmy.world (I can’t recall a Lemmy instance that’s not for personal use ever shutting down); they’ve functioned just fine for years and have even been upgraded for the surge of users too
Lemmy.fmhy.ml shutdown and hasnt come back yet. My understanding is that it won’t be back, but that was the instance I signed up for initially to spread the server load