How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

A warning and a perspective from an insider who has been through this before.

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.

The biggest issue is who pays for the server infrastructure at scale.

This made me wonder - what happens if my chosen Lemmy server goes down? Do I lose my account?

Hopefully, some kind of account portability is possible or in consideration. Even if it's a manual download of settings and subscriptions that could easily be uploaded to another instance.

As of right now, yes your account would go poof. Mastodon currently has a way to migrate servers, but it hasn't been implemented in Lemmy yet. I'm sure at some point it will become available, but if you are worried about all your posts I'd make local backups for now.
Thanks. I'm not really worried about my comments, nothing I'm saying is that useful long term. It's more the list of subscriptions, that would be a headache to recreate.
Agreed that would be a huge pain.