I mean that’s every web site all the time though. The owner/admin can always just delete it.
Like others have said, nothing is stopping them. That is why it is important to spread communities around to other reputable instances, so if something like that does happen, only the communities on that particular instance are lost.
Technically I could. But as with mastodon.world I have made a promise to ensure continuity by creating a team of sysadmins and moderators with access, and making sure it can be transferred to them might I get hit by a bus, or get bored of this.
But I hope there will be a feature to export your posts soon so you can create your own backups too.
Nothing. The admins giveth and the admins taketh away.
What’s stopping Reddit from just nuking it and deleting all the posts in one day?
Money and rules around said money. Reddit might not be profitable but it’s still a business. They have a team of people who’s job is to make sure the business continues. Spez can do a lot of stuff but he’d have a rebellion if he tried to press the off button. And he’d have a lot of debts.
“Lehman Brothers might not be profitable but it’s still a business”
Also, search LLC.
Money is a trivial obstacle to overcome for many people. There’s nothing stopping Elon from deleting every tweet, for example, because Twitter is no longer public and it is genuinely his property.
I’ll tell you what there’s not, is a Mr. Moneybags investor at the top of the pyramid saying “I forbid you (admin) to act in any way that damages my future earnings.” So without that guy in the picture, yeah, you could say there’s nothing “stopping” the creators of an instance from deleting it. There’s no one there to sue them for lost earnings because some precious monetizable content was removed. But is threat of lawsuits and bankruptcy to force content to stay up forever and ever really better than just letting individual admins of individual instances have total control? Just like any social media, what you post here doesn’t “belong” to you anymore, you don’t have some special right for it to stay up on the platform, it belongs to the site, and they can remove it, or the entire site, if they want to.
What’s stopping you from burning your house down?
The answer is usually not that the house is completely impervious to fire, nor even that the fire department would come and put it out, but that you don’t want to do that.
Burning my house down will cost me money. Shutting lemmy.world down will save the owner a lot of money. They’re not really comparable.
The reality is that a lot of lemmy hosts will rise and fall over the years, and a lot of communities will disappear with them.
Random question, but how would that work out with my account? Would I keep my username and just change my server, or need a whole new account?
What’s stopping that one person from pooping? That’s the real fucking question.
Opioids maybe
Nothing.
Likelihood of that actually happening: Incredibly low. Lemmy world is built with being the general server for a lot of people in mind. There’s a big admin team. It’s a higher likelihood for a random one who finds they can’t afford to run a instance.
lemmy.world didn’t even exist last month. It’s funded by patreon. https://blog.mastodon.world/welcome-lemmy-world
Yep small instances are much more likely to just shutdown. It happened to me, I thought I found my main instance in dataterm.digital and then it just got deleted :(
Short answer – nothing.
Longer answer – Those communities, posts and comments will still exist on the other servers, but sadly interacting with them will not federate that data to other instances anymore, since the host instance is no longer active.
So you would still be able to see the posts and their comments on other servers?
We got to see exactly what would happen a week ago when Beehaw defederated from lemmyworld. For us (on lemmyworld) it was like if that server had disappeared. Comments from beehaw stayed on the list, but new content from them (comments or posts) didnt show.
