I believe (might be wrong!) there was literally one guy working on it so anything in their personal situation could be the reason

It’s hard enough to find a good alternative, let alone a FOSS one… So sad to see KC and SUMO go…

Someone should then probably let them know 🤷

I think it just auto-discovers federated instances and randomly shows them on the page unless explicitly disabled…

The website that you visit (as in your Lemmy instance) does log your IP address to fight abuse etc. Afaik it’s not sent to other instances, so unless the server admin sells it somewhere (which they shouldn’t but I guess you never know - that’s why some folks host their own instance), it shouldn’t leave the server.

Obviously that doesn’t mean your IP is not logged by external services embedded in the Lemmy UI you’re using - be that ads, video players, etc