After a month and a half downtime all the users will have moved on to other instances. This is essentially a death sentence for the instance and its communities.
You underestimate the userbase. I made a temp account in the mean time, but we are a hyper tight knit community. We will probably lose accounts - no question - but the core userbase will return
I agree. I replied to Kris elsewhere saying this, but I am super glad to have been a part of this instance because it feels like a nice balance of being large enough to be robust and diverse, but small enough to have a distinctive culture. I don't often interact with the communities that were on the instance, but I always enjoy seeing my peers crop up in the comments of various posts — it's one of my favourite parts of Lemmy being federated (db0 is another example of an instance that has such a distinctive vibe that seeing it as someone's instance is often useful metadata that affects how I parse their comment)
Idk, quite a few (me included) made alt accounts for the time being, and we'll return when it becomes possible, especially if we really do migrate to piefed.
Lets see. I think a relaunch on Piefed might interest some people to come back, and most slrpnk communities are rather niche and will probably stay. /c/climate might move though.
I dont think it will be. I've had two accounts for a while to deal with unexpected issues & will happily return to my slrpnk account once it's back up and running :)
Plus for the communities, people who were subscribed to them before will likely stay subscribed & once the instance is back up the posts will be in their feeds without an issue.
Being able to accommodate issues like this is one of the major upsides to a decentralized platform.
I think the migration to Piefed would be worse. Piefed is great, but needs better App support for Lemmy users to migrate. A merge of the Thunder fork into main Thunder would get the ball rolling.
I think now that Piefed has an API for apps, we will see some of them adding support soon. Overall I think the benefits of a Piefed migration outweight the disadvantages, but it remains to be seen if it is doable.