lemm.ee has shut down at 00:14 UTC.
unfortunately I realized too late that I have had hundreds of saved links to posts and comments from there, so I did not have enough time to save them, but anyways it is interesting that maybe a third of the post links I could try were dead. I think linkrot is happening much faster here than on reddit, even if just counting deleted posts.
If admins goes missing like the feddit.de ones did, the same problem would still impact that instance, be it a user or a content instance
If admins just want to shutdown without willing to transfer the instance / domain like the lemm.ee ones did, the same problem would still impact that instance, be it a user or a content instance
Using instances with non profit like https://fedecan.ca/en/ (lemmy.ca and piefed.ca) seems a better way to mitigate that risk.
I think you are misunderstanding the problem being solved. Expecting all instances to become non-profits and manage even more responsibility exacerbates the problem and inhibits the fediverse growth. Non-profits also have their share of pitfalls and is an entirely different beast.
lemm.ee told you the reason they were shutting down - not enough people to keep the place running and burnout. I can’t force you to see how minimizing and distributing responsibility helps those issues if you don’t want to. Less responsibility, easier for people not to ditch projects or end them.
That has nothing to do about what they decided to do afterwards. I thank them for not transferring the instance domain to a completely different party without user consent, and people would have disagreed with that so it’s best everyone found their own solution. It would even have put their account information at risk.
Lemm.ee had the option to close their registration at any time. But registrations are only one source of user management.
In a scenario where Lemm.ee would have become a content instance, but kept their federation policy, they would still have received all the reports about posts on the communities they hosted, wherever the reported user comes from.
Lemm.ee was the instance with the most active communities after LW, there’s no way to avoid a certain level of responsibility.