Rhaedas

Exactly my point, you’re tied to a specific server for your account regardless. There’s no shared federated user info that can be recovered if that happens. One solution is to make your own instance where your account lives, and then it’s just up to you to make sure it doesn’t get lost in a crash without a backup. But that’s more complex than the average user is willing to take on.

Same here. It still has the limitation of being instance-based though, so if you decide to move to another server or our existing instance shuts down, you can’t take your account stuff with you (like when I had to move from Kbin and “lost” the first few months). Which may never be possible given the design of federation. I recall the question came up pretty early when people were concerned about picking the “right” instance without any knowledge of anything, and some were throwing around ideas of a way to pass along user history from one account to another…but I don’t know the state of that.

Probably trying to mirror Reddit, which had /r/politics for US, and /r/worldnews for everything else. There was a lot of effort (probably wrongly) to try and copy Reddit over instead of finding new ways to do things. /r/worldpolitics was the original sub, but there’s an interesting drama story there.

If Lemmy and other fediverse discussion areas had developed slower and more naturally there might have been more of a country/instance symmetry, but anyone who was around when the Reddit implosion and migration happened knows that it was total chaos and a grab bag of where a new user should sign up. Lemmy and the rest were not ready for such a shift, and now that everyone’s been in a place or two for a while, short of a closure or blocking or whatever there’s no reason to move around to a matching country and instance, if there even is one. People mainly look for popularity, activity, themes, and engagement, and if that’s found on the other side of the globe it works.

The idea of migration and data preservation has been a topic since day one, since that’s a big reason why so many moved to the Fediverse. I still haven’t seen a perfect solution, and maybe there isn’t one. Perhaps just having a lot of redundancy (oh no, reposts!) is the only true way of protecting posts for as long as possible, and even then…

Ernest started things rolling with something that probably wasn’t ready for the demand, but it was there when the time came. That others forked off from it and kept it going is the bright spot here. I appreciate Lemmy and even have an account from the first days, but I like the kbin/mbin setup better so that’s where I sit.