I have just made my first lemmy account on lemmy.world. What happens to my account in the event that this particular instance goes offline temporarily or permanently? It seems like I will have to either wait for the instance to come back online or create a new account, is this correct?
For that matter, would it be the same for mastadon and other fediverse services?
Basically, yeah. Each may differ a little in terms of what they enable exporting to move to different sites using the same service backend (Mastodon/Lemmy/etc.), but many of them are decent about letting you export your settings, subscriptions, and blocks/filters.
One detail many of them aren’t good about in terms of data portability is your posts though. Some people are, understandably, very particular about this, as they hate to lose their posts, so it’s something to be aware of.
Ideally all of your data on a service backend would be portable to another on the same backend, but that’s largely not the case right now. So if there’s anything you’re thinking about sharing across these services that you’d like to keep, I’d recommend making it as a local file first (.txt/.md/.odt, .png, or whatever) so it’s not entangled with a web service. To be honest, that’s a good rule of thumb for any digital material regardless as far as I’m concerned.