I’m just curious, since I tend to get attached to my accounts but I also like having access to all information so I don’t want to use a defederated instance. If, say, kbin got overrun by bad actors and was defederated by everyone else, is the only option to jump ship? Unfortunately I don’t have the capability to selfhost or I would to avoid such problems.
What are your contingency plans if such a thing occurs?
What exactly is an instance? Is it an EC2, a container somewhere, something else?
An instance is an individual installation of the (Lemmy / Kbin / Mastodon) system. One person might be hosting something on Docker, another might pay a web host, another might just have an old Linux box they set up with a static IP and such. Each instance is self-contained and could function as an independent entity but there are also tools built in that let those independently hosted instances talk and share.
I like to liken it to email providers for simplicity. Gmail and Hotmail are independently hosted, COULD function as independent, internal only systems… but they use common protocols to talk and share email.