I was just in the middle of trying out 3rd party clients, so I initially thought it was the clients. That being said, it only took a half-hour to rebuild my profile (mostly re-subscribing to stuff). I feel like lemmy.sdf.org is noticeably slower, although I’m still grateful for their work.
Personally it was quite annoying. It was made more annoying due to the fact that I literally wrote a long comment about this exact scenario where I advised the reader to get multiple accounts but that I basically couldn’t be arsed to do it myself.
However, at the very least, the communities I followed are all fine, and obviously the Fediverse itself won’t be impacted by vlemmy’s disappearance. (It so happened that none of the communities I followed were on Vlemmy, other than its support community.) I got wrecked for a few hours, but there’s an easy path for me to recover (make a new account on a different instance).
In my view, this event justifies why the Fediverse is more robust than a centralized system, even a hypothetical one without corporate control. It is no longer (for me) a hypothetical situation: my instance shit the bed, and I got through it. We thought Vlemmy was rock solid. It had some of the best uptime in the game. While I was briefly inconvenienced, the system went on and I was able to quickly rejoin the conversation.
Honestly, I hope Vlemmy comes back. I’m not going to bet on it (and this time I’m actually going to follow my own advice), but I miss the experience. If not, it will bring me great closure to find out why the site died.
Lastly, I think we need to be able to download our user data to a JSON like in Invidious. At a bare minimum, we need profile data and the list of subscriptions so that the new instance can regenerate the desired feed from the old instance. Furthermore, Vlemmy was one of the few instances who had no defederations or blocked instances [1]. To get a full picture of the Fediverse, it will probably be necessary to have two or more accounts under the assumption that the union of the instances’ federations will be enough to cover the desired subset of the Fediverse. It’s certainly possible, it just needs to be implemented. I guess I have an actual reason to learn Rust now!
[1] Vlemmy had just recently defederated from burggit for legal reasons. Otherwise, they were federated with everyone. I really value the existence of a small number of instances not defederating from anyone because I want to be aware of idiots and assholes on the platform that normal instances (rightly) filter out. The Meta situation has really challenged that perspective, and I reserve the right to change my mind about this. All I know is that it is really convenient to go on Vlemmy or sdf and be pretty certain that I’m seeing all the discussion. That, and that I love a good shitshow every once in a while.