[lapcat]

> The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing is incredibly low. There are community standards and things like the Mastodon Server Covenant that make this essentially a non-issue.

This has actually happened. It's a real problem. For example, "Mastodon instance mstdn.plus with over 4K users suddenly broke" https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html

As far as I'm concerned, the Mastodon Server Covenant is a joke.

[filmgirlcw]

I came here to day this.

Another example: Mastodon.lol, which had 12,000 users literally shutdown a few hours ago. They did manage to give notice but the point remains that people had to move instances, cannot take their posts with them, and it’s a giant PITA, server covenant or not.

To call this stuff a “non-issue” seems incredibly obtuse, especially when the data portability piece is clearly an after thought by the Mastodon devs, and something that ActivityPub would need some major changes to get accomplished. Changes that the project leads have been fairly against implementing.

[solarpunk]

there's also a trend of most servers not even being compliant with the 'covenant'

[raggi]

Y’all should see the dead letters in the publish queues from dead indie servers of which thousands have gone offline but whose addresses will get looked up forevermore