Asklemmy

43806 readers

1255 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What happens if an instance is deleted to its communities and users? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I imagine users go poof. Are their profiles stored in other federated instances? Is there a way to recover them or "import from backup" onto another instance?

If they don't have an e-mail I imagine you can't even notify them or authenticate them elsewhere so this "import from backup" even if technically feasible (idk if it is) would be impossible in practice due to authentication issues.

And communities, can you even notify all your subscribers to move to the "backup community" on another instance? I saw yesterday that a Mastodon server host said "I'm deleting this instance in 2 days" or something like that and I started wondering how shit would go on Lemmy.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If the owner has a backup, you can always recover the instance, but otherwise everything is lost. That's the downside of federation I guess.

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

Is there anything I can do as a user to make sure I don’t get Thanos’ed out of existence if the owner of an instance decides he’s shutting down?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm afraid not, short of running your own instance. Hopefully Lemmy will support user data export some day.

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

is ur pfp AI?

also agreed and thank u for the info, waiting for someone to make an export plugin or something, im not the best suited for it cuz i know 0% Golang.

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

posts that have been federated to other instances will be recoverable I would think