I feel like having so many instances open before Lemmy as a whole grew really big is gonna be a hurdle for communities to grow really big. But maybe the culture of Lemmy will center itself around instances rather than communities. Either way I'm glad to see a Reddit competitor that actually expands upon what Reddit was doing through federation instead of just being "what if Reddit was smaller and buggier"
Yeah, with Reddit you can be pretty sure your subreddits aren't going anywhere, but I'm wondering whether Lemmy will have issues long term with instances going down and taking all their data with them. Is there a way for instances to be mirrored?
I could be interested in working on writing a mirroring tool if that is something people would like. I'm a developer looking to work on a project related to lemmy so if anyone wants help or needs contributors to already established projects please ping me :)
Seems like it would be a fun project to work on, for sure. I'm a complete Rust noob, though (mostly do C#/.NET at work).
I wonder how the idea of federation works with instance mirroring. Would it be a backup system, where perhaps one backup instance shadows multiple live instances? Or maybe some way for a live instance to be distributed across multiple servers (and owners)?