It wasn’t like that. The owner went on a long vacation during which the server’s disk ran full, the database was corrupted as a result, and the backup was overwritten with a corrupted state, before the owner returned.

feddit.org was created as a community effort to keep that from happening again.

Plenty of others too: vlemmy.net, iusearch.fyi, lemmy.film.

That’s why people should pay attention to a few things when looking for a server

• are there at least two admins?
• are they communicating regularly, including on their finances
• is there a Matrix chat or another way to reach out to them

The early internet also had personal website vanishing or being abandoned all the time. Static webpages don’t need constant maintenance but it’s more noticeable when it’s a community.

Well, my experience is running a large lemmy server is pretty annoying and takes a lot of time to actually turn into a social media site with people instead of just bots and you don’t see any improvement for long times. I think after the reddit thing happened technical minded people were able to quickly launch this software but it isn’t what you expect and you eventually stop logging in.