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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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My initial thought was to build an archive server that grabs all the federated instances' content via the public APIs. Then each instance would then have the option to purge after. However, this prevents folks from discovering it. Unless they are aware of the archive. I bought the domain lemmy.rehab for this. Perhaps, we could even create an instance that hosts only a backend for these dead communities that no one owns. Then moderation would be a nightmare.

The second option was post a sticky post that said this community was dead and no longer synced. But for how long is that useful? What if someone finds a post from years ago and comments and never visits the main feed to see it's dead?

Another option is to put in a request for the core devs to have archived communities. Read-only. However, these communities will remain in a constant out-of-sync status. Comments and posts on discuss.online will never show on lemmy.world or the other way around.

I'm not certain of any option.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My initial thought was to build an archive server that grabs all the federated instances' content via the public APIs. Then each instance would then have the option to purge after. However, this prevents folks from discovering it.

It would ideally still be indexed by web crawlers, so the content of defunct sites could still be shared.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That’s true. That could be useful. I could do that somewhat simply too.