Basically the title. I’m here from the Reddit exodus but I’ve been on mastodon before. But I’m not sure what happens when an instance goes offline or goes down, will I have to make a new account on a different instance instead? Do I lose all my data? Thank you :)
It’s a mixed bag
I use my own instance 95% of the time. But there are times where I like to use the “All” filter instead of local or subscribed and can find some interesting content I haven specifically sought out. On your own personal instance subscribed and all are basically the same thing.
So I still use accounts, like this one, from before when I built my own. But I am a control freak and like to be in the know as to when I upgrade and or backup. So my own instance is nice for that.
Can’t we federate our instance and get access to the lemmy fediverse all feed?
You have to go and search out communities to federate with. This is done at the user level . Even now there are a ton of servers so pulling info on everything would probably overload servers as is.
Some of the larger instances are spinning up dedicated containers to handle user traffic and others that do just federation. Which makes sense.
It’s why I like my account here. The folks here are probably more infosec minded and thus, searching all may/has shown me communities I haven’t seen quite yet searching fediverse.
Others may have similar.
But TL:DR: no. You instance will only sync what users have searched. So some of the larger instances may have interesting things in “all” that you may not see.
Thanks for clearing that up!