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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[–] cakeistheanswer 3 points 1 year ago

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.