Source: https://xkcd.com/743/

The fact that the alt-text directly mentions Diaspora is more than amusing in this context

What we really need is some sort of torrent-like system for this content with something equivalent to magnet links.

Before reddit removed them most of this compiled knowledge was in the subreddit wikis. I honestly believe a return to communities with wikis is the long term replacement.

I was on a mastodon server and the owner decided it was not worth his money to keep running. He did not inform anyone on the server or allow any account backups and all was lost.

In practice the content is distributed to all the other servers, so people who have been reading it before will still be able to on their own instance, but you're right the indexed domain is gone and so are the results in Google.

But there is one difference, one instance of lemmy only stores a very small fraction of the content. And it's much easier to fuck up one reddit compared to fuck up thousands of lemmy instances simultaneously. So if one instance goes down, the rest of the fediverse is still up and running.

I think it's a fair concern. We've seen other parts of the fediverse successfully implement crowd sourced funding via patron and similar to keep mastodon servers running and I suspect if Lemmy remains "the place to be" admins will have reasonable success with a similar model. Lemmy is super efficient and can support 100s of users on a single box so I think if 1% of users paid like $5 a month you could probably still support 99% of users "for free".

These are certainly possibilities! It's happened elsewhere in the Fediverse... but already we can export most of our data and migrate to a different instance. Getting these base features right is important before enhancing their functionality. Planning for the future is important too. So far I've been impressed by Lemmy, though it's not nearly as portable as Mastodon or Calckey or Pleroma etc. Part of that is that in Lemmy/kbin we don't follow other users... we subscribe to groups (subs/communities/magazines).

Still, with the nature of ActivityPub, it's inevitable that migration tools for Reddit-like federated apps will get built quick-like

I'm sorry, but clearly you have not looked for niche information on Google for a while now. Lots of links end in dead ones, particularly when I am looking for vehicle information on older models.

I believe archive.org fits the definition

Yep. I blog infrequently but I’ve said a few times in my posts, I am writing this article because I need to remember the steps to do this weird niche thing in case something breaks in the future. If it happens to help someone else out, great.