Instances can go down, disappear or be unresponsive due to many reasons.
Go to your account settings now and export your account settings!
This file contains your subscriptions, follows, profile settings etc. It’s very easy to start over on a new instance when you have your export file.
Back it up, export it, save it, repeat occasionally.
I follow like 50 communities I will never get exposed to again, because I switched instances already.