this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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What to do when communities die? (discuss.online)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think the ideal solution would be devising some way for the content to live on cached in other servers and continue to sync comments and upvotes among them. It would be a shame for useful content to go away, and allowing for communities and instances to rise and fall and live and die seems like something decentralized content should expect to happen without leaving information holes.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

This would be much easier if the original owners of the instances helped bring it down. Their servers have private keys that verify ownership of the content for the fediverse to work in a trustworthy way.

Without these keys the content has to stay in a sort of read-only state.