This is my current understanding of the situation:

• The admins are no longer interested in running the instance, due to increasing demand, missing moderation features and waves of abuse from external actors.
• Transferring the instance to someone else is a complicated issue. Even though there is not a large amount of private information in Lemmy’s database, you can not simply transfer the trust the users placed in the original admin to the new owner.
• Lemmy still does not provide an easy way to migrate accounts

Given all the above, shutting down the instance seems to be the natural course of action. I’d like to propose an alternative: freeze the instance activity and keep it in some form of “read-only” mode until Lemmy matures.

What would that require?

0. Take the instance down (no more incoming activities)
1. Run a script that generates static json files for every actor (user, community), federated object (post, comment, report) and activity (like/dislike votes, announce activities, etc)
2. Set up a static site to serve all that JSON.
3. Take the media on pict-rs and move to some long-term back up system.
4. (Optional, but could be helpful in the future) allow users to checkout the private keys of their own user and community actors.

This won’t help solve the current problems and it wouldn’t help with the users who now will have to move away to a new instance, but it could eventually help for users who want to restore the activity on a new server.

I’ve been experimenting with an implementation for Decentralized Identifiers for ActivityPub that can make it possible for people to move servers but maintain their identity (similar to bluesky’s PLC directory), so perhaps we could have a future where users can fully migrate their accounts from server to server without requiring intervention from admins.