It’s always sad to see a country-based instance go, they bring together a nice community, and it’s an opportunity to learn more about the country.
Maintaining an instance is a lot of work, so this decision definitely makes sense if the admin didn’t have the time to take care of it. Hopefully the other instances are still going strong.
I keep hearing that it doesn’t matter which instance you join because of federation.
But it does matter when some instances lack the resources to stay alive. The biggest loss would be the content hosted on the instance.
The content will not be lost, because each federated instance keeps its own copy.
I believe images are only hosted on the original instance.
For example if you browse this post on lemmy.world:
https://lemmy.world/post/13015119
Respective images are shown directly from the original instances, for example: https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/c7285a60-c7ee-4013-8d96-6c13a541c2f0.jpeg
For text posts, I understand that they are copied across instances. But will they remain visible when an instance is completely removed?
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Unfortunately even if you use external hosts, the instances will still keep a copy of the picture locally.
I guess they wanted to avoid losing all pictures in case an image hoster goes bust.
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It doesn’t matter as long as you use one of the top 10-15 instances. That’s the rule of thumb.
If people want to get more exotic, they should pay attention to that the instance follows the Mastodon Covenant (https://joinmastodon.org/covenant):
Users must have the confidence that they are joining a safe space, free from white supremacy, anti-semitism and transphobia of other platforms.
It is important for users to have the confidence that a trip over the power cable or a rogue bit flip will not erase all of their data. Having a backup strategy is a basic necessity of providing a public service.
Various circumstances can prevent the original owner of the Mastodon server from answering technical emergencies. For this reason, more than one person must have that capability.
Sometimes services shut down, it is the cycle of life. But users must have the confidence that their account will not disappear overnight, so that they have time to export their data and find another server.