It had a few niche communities I would occasionally post to after the Reddit exodus but a couple months later I would post there and get no responses or votes. Going to lemmy.film now gives me an error message. Did they decide to shut it down or combine with another instance similar to FMHY? I am curious if they gave some kind of statement.
I am also curious what happened when I post into their communities now. It still gives me the option and I can see prior posts. How does that work with post federation?
Edit: Is there a good community for lemmy specific questions by the way? I know there are a few AskLemmy’s but some say they are not for support and redirect to support communities but I am not sure if they are specific to that instance.
I don’t know the specifics of what may have happened with Lemmy.film, so we’ll have to see if someone else may know.
As to what happens to posts to “their” communities, my rough understanding is that with the host server gone, federation either doesn’t occur or maybe attempts to reach the host but simply stops after some number of attempts. Upon failure I think it simply collects the posts on your home server/instance’s copy of the community.
Not sure what would happen if a new instance was spun up of Lemmy.film either from a backup or in general, but I’d imagine there’s some settings/adjustments that may be calibrated to prevent it getting a backlog of posts dumped on it causing it to get bogged down or crash.
As to questions specifically about the Lemmy software, you may try !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml or !lemmy@lemmy.ml, think either one would be okay for this.