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] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm leaning towards the do nothing option.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The problem is that if anyone comments or likes on discuss.online it’ll forever try to sync back “home”. I’m not sure that it expires yet. Forever network noise.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is it possible for discuss.online to have a reference list somewhere of dead/offline communities? If someone tries to like a post on them, or comments on them, could the user receive a warning that this won't be sent through? Ideally, could there be some indicator on each post + the main page of the community that this community is on a dead instance? Always nicer to have that before someone spends an hour crafting a really good reply not knowing it won't be going anywhere.

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

I'm somewhat limited by core Lemmy functionality and the time available to extend it. However, I have an open wiki page, https://wiki.discuss.online, where I could create a list. I can build tools that report these communities and post them there.

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

If that network noise causes problems, address it. Otherwise, I don't see why you should spend effort on it.

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

It'll be problematic at scale. Nothing but log noise right now. However, it's difficult to parse through real issues in logs, currently.

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

Restriction to mods only seems like a good idea.

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

I think it's an excellent short-term bandage. But we will need something for the long-term.