the loss of the hosting instance makes it hard to coordinate a replacement

I’m interested in this as its basically the issue that we’re potentially facing on reddit. There’s a lot of trans sites that have died over the years, or in the cases of Susans lost years of data.

I had thought that Federation meant the communities were duplicated across instances providing redundancy, but it sounds like that’s not correct. Am I correct in thinking if the instance dies then there’s no real way to rebuild the community as it was before?

What actually happens?

I just signed up here and it appears my account is tied to this instance. If this instance is lost then my account is lost? I can make accounts on other instances, but there’s nothing tying them together?

The federation design can handle a lot more traffic than the trans community on reddit can generate.

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

There are more active mods and admins that have less tolerance for bigotry, meaning that bigots get stomped on more reliably than on reddit.

There’s an incredible amount of hate and chasers on reddit, and if you had to rely on manual moderation I don’t think anyone could cope. 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. The sub moderation is part of it, with lots of automated filtering (which is why the people from Lemmy were having trouble posting in the sub), but the site also keeps them suppressed. When it didn’t it was really bad.

No, its part of the automated filtering on the sub.