That shouldn’t make you lose your job though, unless you work in a really shitty place. Own it, recover from backup, bring the account back up to date, then everyone has a bit of a laugh at your expense until next time it happens. Small inconvenience for the customer, who quite rightly complains about it, but they’ll get over it. Absolutely not a big deal.
If you haven’t got backups then it’s not you that should get fired but the backup guy, unless of course you ARE the backup guy.
The software’s not the problem though. Infrastructure isn’t free. You can self-host Lemmy off your own broadband for a while, but as your site grows this’ll become infeasible. So then you have to host on someone else’s hardware: AWS or whatever, and paying a few 10s or maybe a few 100s of currency per month is fine, but then suddenly you go viral and get clobbered with a bill for 50K.
Plus of course there’s the time you need to spend working on the service. It isn’t paying, by definition, so not only are you not getting an income from it you’re also not able to work at something else which could give you an income. This is fine for rich playboys but not for the rest of us wage slaves.
And so you need an income to sustain the service, and thus the descent into enshittification begins. This will only be solved when we get free infrastructure, but how?