What happens when YC decides to shut down HN? Or, alternatively, they do $THING you don't like?

Worst case, with Lemmy, some server op decides to rage quit and shut down the server, and you're left in the same situation as if HN decided to just shut down without notice. In the other scenario, with Lemmy, you do the same thing you would if the same thing happened at HN: either play along or take your ball and go home.

You're right that being federated doesn't magically make people into reasonable humans. If you happen to discover that technology, please let me know; I have several hundred thousand people I'd like to use it on for starters lol.... But, at least with Lemmy, you have an easy option to start up your own server if you don't like how someone is running one that you participate on.

Mastodon's account migration implementation has some serious issues. AFAIK you can't migrate without access to the original account, so if that instance shuts down you're out of luck. I think it's also not possible to move past posts to a different instance so if your original one gets in bad hands you cannot get your content off of that.

My problem with Lemmy is that I just can't figure out what happens if server A has a "sub-section" called news, and server B also has an instance called news. Do they get merged into one view? Do both servers now have two different "news" sections? I can't seem to get any solid answers on this and that's why I haven't bothered registering or using it yet.