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What to do when communities die?

Hello,

There is a unique problem of the fediverse. When an instance goes offline, its communities will never sync again.

Recently, vlemmy.com shutdown. Quite a few communities synced with discuss.online and other instances. Because vlemmy.com is not longer brokering communication, these communities will never be in sync again.

We have a several options:

  1. Leave them there. Do nothing.
  2. Leave them there but make a post that it's dead and hope people see it.
  3. Purge the communities. Act like they never existed.
  4. Build some elaborate system to work around vlemmy being gone. This would take a lot of work and collaboration with other instances.

Let me know what makes the most sense to you as users. Are any of you still using vlemmy communities? What about long-term planning? Maybe this isn't an issue now but what if lemmy.world vanished?

Please, let me know what you think. I'm torn on this one.

Thanks, Jason

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  • This topic is of extreme importance to the success of widespread adoption of the fediverse.

    And I'm not seeing much discussion about it, despite having posted about it elsewhere, As an aside, I can't atm log in to the account where I brought this up, due to instability, or maybe a ddos. No telling, but that I can't log in shows a weakness that the general users won't tolerate. I suspect I've lost another account, along with the community I created and the attendant work, when a fmhy.ml went offline.

    While non-tech people will come, there's a good chance they'll leave when lemmy.fmhy.ml, for example, disappears, taking their community and all their contributions with it.

    There are many reasons why servers and domains will evaporate. And users will emigrate from an unstable, unreliable environment.

    Redundancy and backup are critical. Maybe p2p is the solution, I don't know. The fix is above my pay grade.

    But this weakness will be exploited. Pissed off instance owners, blackhats working for moneyed interests to whom the fediverse represents a multi-billion dollar threat, drive failures, lightning strikes, the 'how' doesn't matter. It's simply a matter of 'when,' and what will result.

    This concept must become more resilient in order to be viable over the long term.

    • I mean the service is still up despite my instance being down. I was up and running on another instance in 5 minutes.

      I think this is expectations just not matching the state of development we have now, it's new! Federation built on project urls will give way to stable instances when exactly stuff like this happens, but make no mistake we're in the reputation building phase right now. Being proactive about the unforseen is hard.

      I fully expect some support for instance migration, there's already a few tools to back up. In the meantime I imagine best practices should include a note to make a couple accounts on different instances. Might help people understand the architecture as a bonus.

    • You're welcome to bring your community here. I've survived a few attacks that have taken others down. I'm a software engineer and infrastructure guy. My goal is 99.9% uptime.

      I'm also working on some of these issues, or at least the tools to help identify them.

      I think many servers will come and go mostly due to cost. There isn't a great way to cover costs today, and the cost get higher and higher as you grow. I'm in a unique situation than most, where I'm willing to take losses for a long time before donations catch up.

      Based on my experience and observations, it appears that things will vanish, and I want to find a way to preserve them and react to it without ruining the image of the fediverse or Lemmy.

22 comments