this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)

Fediverse

26832 readers
104 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

In the Fediverse, what is the solution to instances or servers going missing?

To elaborate: The problem with commercial aggregators like Reddit, Twitter/X, Facebook, etc. is enshitification, for one reason or another. Of course, Lemmy, etc. on the Fediverse is the alternative solution, seemingly. But let's say that the hardware for a large Lemmy instance just disappears. What happens to all of the posts? Yes, old posts will still be available for a while on other instances. But, seemingly, there won't be any more updates. How is this addressed?

Moderators would of course be interested in continuing but they may not have the skills and resources to set up the hardware.

Instances/servers can disappear for many reasons: retirement, illness, confiscation, war, bungee jumping or parachuting accident, ... the list goes on.

top 7 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] chris@l.roofo.cc 1 points 11 months ago

I read a proposal for the ActivityPub spec for shared groups. It means that a group can essentially be hosted from two instances together. But AFAIK the proposal is not yet approved and it needs to be implemented in lemmy for it to work. Right now a community is gone if the instance is gone.

[–] minnix@lemux.minnix.dev 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There is none, except for server mirrors. But most admins don't bother with that. The ultimate solution is to host your own instance. You can do that because the source is available.

But what's the solution to investors dumping reddit, Elon running X into the ground, etc? Not only is there not one, but Reddit hasn't been open source for years, and the only thing that's been opened with X is its recommendation algorithm.

[–] Aux@lemmy.world -1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Your own instant doesn't solve anything.

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It does somehow, because you are responsible for keeping it online

[–] Aux@lemmy.world -1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So what do you propose exactly? That everyone just moves to your own instance? That won't work.

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm not talking about users, but communities.

In summary, if you really want to make sure that your communities are well managed, host them on your own instance.

[–] Aux@lemmy.world -1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, that's the problem :)