This is a concern, but luckily this isn't required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don't need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.

To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.

But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.

[–] Historical_General@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Is it open like an instance or is it for hosting communities only?

[–] Bilbo@hobbit.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you're asking what the $6 gets, I'm talking about a single shard which allows me to host a Linux instance that runs a Lemmy instance. I wasn't sure if that was sufficient, but honestly, the performance via Jerboa is better than when I was using an account on lemmy.world. It has only been a week, so don't know how much disk will get used up over time. Long term I might need to bump things up for storage.

[–] Historical_General@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago

Oh, I meant would people be able to make accounts on it? Or is it purely for hosting communities?