Money and rules around said money. Reddit might not be profitable but it's still a business. They have a team of people who's job is to make sure the business continues. Spez can do a lot of stuff but he'd have a rebellion if he tried to press the off button. And he'd have a lot of debts.
Money is a trivial obstacle to overcome for many people. There's nothing stopping Elon from deleting every tweet, for example, because Twitter is no longer public and it is genuinely his property.
Like others have said, nothing is stopping them. That is why it is important to spread communities around to other reputable instances, so if something like that does happen, only the communities on that particular instance are lost.
Longer answer -- Those communities, posts and comments will still exist on the other servers, but sadly interacting with them will not federate that data to other instances anymore, since the host instance is no longer active.
We got to see exactly what would happen a week ago when Beehaw defederated from lemmyworld. For us (on lemmyworld) it was like if that server had disappeared. Comments from beehaw stayed on the list, but new content from them (comments or posts) didnt show.
Yep, but if you reply to said post, only other users on YOUR instance will see those comments. Any other instance and it would be like you didn't reply at all.
But the host can initiate a request to delete the data from other federated instances. This will be handled automatically unless the other instances specifically block/stop the deletion request.
In theory ya, an admin could remove/delete the communities, posts and/or comments and then let that data federate out, and they would then be hidden on all of the other servers. But there'd be nothing stopping someone from still replying or creating new posts while that's going on.
I could be wrong but I don't think there's a mass delete tool for the admins.
I've gone three days before, fasting. I know people who have been constipated for more three days, and they didn't stop eating!!! That is fucking horrifying to me. If you can't shit, stop eating!!!
Someone finally implementing full replication / migration / domain virtualisation, that will. atm, there are other things more pressing for the dev team, though. (Anyone here who could fund such major development?)
Btw. i think more likely than big instances being abandoned by their owners (instead of transferring to a new owner), is them being taken down by some law enforcement or legal procedure. Liability costs can make any not-for-profit endeavour vulnerable to bad big player attack.
Likelihood of that actually happening: Incredibly low. Lemmy world is built with being the general server for a lot of people in mind. There's a big admin team. It's a higher likelihood for a random one who finds they can't afford to run a instance.
Yep small instances are much more likely to just shutdown. It happened to me, I thought I found my main instance in dataterm.digital and then it just got deleted :(
You can always host your own instance if you want. It could just be you and your friends, but then you can subscribe to anything on lemmy/kbin. Then you are in charge of your own destiny.
Technically I could. But as with mastodon.world I have made a promise to ensure continuity by creating a team of sysadmins and moderators with access, and making sure it can be transferred to them might I get hit by a bus, or get bored of this.
But I hope there will be a feature to export your posts soon so you can create your own backups too.
The answer is usually not that the house is completely impervious to fire, nor even that the fire department would come and put it out, but that you don't want to do that.
Nothing, but all other instances would still exist. While it would suck, you can just make a quick hop to a new instance (or host your own if you’re worried about who runs things) and you’re back up and running.