Are the registry procedures causing the problem? Since most of my communities are on lemmy.ml, wouldn’t I still be using lemmy.lm’s bandwidth? Or is it more crucial to ensure that the communities are distributed more evenly across different instances?
Ah, I misunderstood then.
What happens if lemmy.ml is down?
All the users and communities registered there will cease being able to connect to the rest of the network, but the data should still be cached on all the other servers.
The keyword is “cache”. Lemmy doesn’t guarantee the cache, so if an instance X would go down permanently, you would eventually lose this data.
My presumption was that with over 200 instances, maybe over 1000 in the near future, all the old data should be collectable in theory without loss. But you’re right, there’s no guarantee of this.
Media from users of lemmy.ml won’t load. You wouldn’t be able to subscribe to communities on lemmy.ml. But I think every other instance would show cached data and hold any new comments/posts/votes to sync when lemmy.ml comes back up. I’m not sure how long that cache is kept.