I imagine users go poof. Are their profiles stored in other federated instances? Is there a way to recover them or “import from backup” onto another instance?
If they don’t have an e-mail I imagine you can’t even notify them or authenticate them elsewhere so this “import from backup” even if technically feasible (idk if it is) would be impossible in practice due to authentication issues.
And communities, can you even notify all your subscribers to move to the “backup community” on another instance? I saw yesterday that a Mastodon server host said “I’m deleting this instance in 2 days” or something like that and I started wondering how shit would go on Lemmy.
At the moment, I’m setting up a Kubernetes config to make it easy to set up and scale, actually! I’m hoping that it helps lower the barrier to entry for people to run their own personal instances.
I would say that hosting a public instance is a very big commitment though, since any users that sign up are depending on you to keep it running indefinitely.