I imagine users go poof. Are their profiles stored in other federated instances? Is there a way to recover them or “import from backup” onto another instance?
If they don’t have an e-mail I imagine you can’t even notify them or authenticate them elsewhere so this “import from backup” even if technically feasible (idk if it is) would be impossible in practice due to authentication issues.
And communities, can you even notify all your subscribers to move to the “backup community” on another instance? I saw yesterday that a Mastodon server host said “I’m deleting this instance in 2 days” or something like that and I started wondering how shit would go on Lemmy.
If the owner has a backup, you can always recover the instance, but otherwise everything is lost. That’s the downside of federation I guess.
Is there anything I can do as a user to make sure I don’t get Thanos’ed out of existence if the owner of an instance decides he’s shutting down?
I’m afraid not, short of running your own instance. Hopefully Lemmy will support user data export some day.