Small instances owned by individuals would be very vulnerable.
If the owner died (yes, morbid), then all user accounts created through that instance could easily disappear if the owner did not have a contingency plan.
Is there any set up that would allow for redundancy? Like two or three folks could all host the instance in some shared way such that if one owner disappeared, the instance wouldn’t be lost?
Of course, larger instances run by organizations can have their own redundancy plans, but more wondering if there are any existing features that allow for a few random folks to share the burden without having to coordinate on access to a AWS account or something like that.
People solve this problem via admin teams, and yes they do tend to share privileged access to infra as their backup plan.
When the worst does happen and an instance shuts down, federation itself is a pretty strong escape hatch. There’s no account migration yet, but you CAN recreate a new account elsewhere and resign up to most of the same communities. Posts/comments on communities that were lost on the server have many posts/comments cached elsewhere. It’s likely that activists could recover much content if they put the effort in.
That’s it to say that loss of an instance isn’t a large inconvenience, but people already have reasonable tools to handle it. Maybe over time the capabilities will improve here, but right now the focus is on performance and mod tools, both of which are absolutely essential to weathering the current growth spike.
Not built-in to Lemmy, but you could archive backups of the code, pictures, db files, etc. using something like SyncThing, which keeps two folders on two machines up to date constantly.
For the database I’d back it up to a file then sync that since it can be messy syncing it otherwise.
