When the server closes, the communities will stay visible on other servers, but any new content posted to them won’t federate to other servers. However, users on remote instances do not receive any indication of this.

As a result, lemm.ee communities will live on in a sort of “undead” state. (Example: https://sh.itjust.works/c/bertstrips@feddit.de (feddit.de shut down about a year ago))

To address this, I would recommend the following actions:

• Set each community to “only moderators can post”
• Include a link to wherever community decides to move to in a pinned thread and the sidebar of each community.
• Prepend the string “[Retired]” or “[Closed]” to the start of the display name of each community. This way, for interfaces where the name may be truncated due to length, it will still be obvious that the community is closed. Additionally, community names starting with “[” will appear in a separate section of an alphabetized list, setting them apart from the rest of the communities.

These steps will inform anyone who comes across the communities after the server closes on what the situation is and prevent them from inadvertently posting to a “dead community”.