I mean the service is still up despite my instance being down. I was up and running on another instance in 5 minutes.

I think this is expectations just not matching the state of development we have now, it's new! Federation built on project urls will give way to stable instances when exactly stuff like this happens, but make no mistake we're in the reputation building phase right now. Being proactive about the unforseen is hard.

I fully expect some support for instance migration, there's already a few tools to back up. In the meantime I imagine best practices should include a note to make a couple accounts on different instances. Might help people understand the architecture as a bonus.

Believe this is cached copies held by your local instance. When federation drops you can still see comments proliferate between anyone federated with you also on the outside, just like with beehaw.

Not an expert so I hope someone corrects me if I'm wrong.

Well kinda feels like my house burned down.

Hopefully the push towards some kind of direct migration comes on the feels of this.

You're a saint. I'd woken up and started to do the usual before I realized I had a backup and that someone here already had the answer.