Fedibridge

What actually happens?

If the instance hosting a community goes down permanently, then all of the content of that community will still be available on remote instances that federated with the lost instance. So you won’t lose old content. However, with the loss of the home instance, broadly speaking, the community is “frozen” and no new content can be generated.

The same is true of user accounts.

There is work to bring account mobility and the like to the fediverse, but if it happens, its a long way off, so you can’t really plan on it happening any time soon.

So, it’s better than reddit, in so far as you don’t risk a complete loss of content like you do if reddit bans a community, but despite the content being available, it is still single point sensitive.

However, as it stands today, there aren’t really any alternatives that let you get away from that risk. Reddit, the fediverse, forums (self hosted or otherwise), they all carry the risk of going down and taking the community with them. The fediverse though at least means the content can be saved.

Can a single instance handle a community of 100k members? Can this one? What's the limit?

Lemmy.world has nearly twice that many users. It’s the largest lemmy instance, and has hefty hardware requirements, but it’s entirely manageable, especially if you’re using crowd funding etc to cover costs.

We’ve hosted 196, one of the busiest lemmy communities (and an image based community at that) without any problems, with plenty of room to scale up if needed.

You may not be seeing it here because Lemmy is smaller, not as well know, and appears to be a bit harder to use and keeps out the idiots.

Yes and no. I used to moderate reddit subs, so I know how they could be. Lemmy is different though. Its mod tools are less mature, but it does have the option of 3rd party mod bots to help. More importantly though, federation itself solves a lot of the problems. Every instance has admins, which means that admins are more active and attentive when their users are causing problems, or when spam waves arrive. And instances that don’t deal with spam or bigots can just be defederated, so their users can’t access the communities at all.

Which is to say, the moderation tools on lemmy aren’t as mature, but lemmy itself mitigates a lot of that, and so it ends up being good enough for the most part.

However, the instance we’re spinning up will be “allow list”, which means it will be very selective about which lemmy instances it federates with, which in turn means that the only users will see content there in the first place are queer focused instances that take moderation seriously, and that will further reduce the reliance on the mod tools themselves