I’m more thinking about old threads. I used to search in subreddits because some information is still useful after years (guides for games, comments on movies/series, …). The information, e.g. this thread, will only be in one instance. Even if there’s a similar community in another instance, this thread will die with lenny.world.

The big, bad instance could just disable federation and all communities and user accounts would be locked on that instance.

There’s a ton of other messengers and there’s WhatsApp but as long as my family doesn’t move from WhatsApp I’m stuck with it.

the exact same software works on other servers which could supplant lemmy.world should the need arise.

But all the communities on lemmy.world would be lost. I was hoping that communities could be forked and run on a different server if needs arise, like we can do with Git repositories.

If you host your own, do you need to establish federation with all other instances or only with the ones you want to use communities from?

If I only federate with lemmy.world, would I be able to see comments on /c/[email protected] on my instance made by a user from lemmy.ml?

Would a user that reads /c/[email protected] on lemmy.ml see my comments, if I only federate with lemmy.world?