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founded 1 year ago

What happens when an instance or magazine/community closes? (kbin.social)

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

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So I've gone with kbin over lemmy for now, folks seem pretty friendly here.

Main question:
I understand that the point of the Fediverse is (relatively) easy access to decentralized communities. But what happens if the folks in charge of an instance decide they want to close it?

If ernest suddenly decides he wants to close kbin, is all the content just lost? Do we have ways to migrate the content/users/everything?

Even the reddit blackout was noticeably "someone else says you can't have this anymore" so I'm a little more sensitive to this than normal lol.

I realize we're in the early stages of the Fediverse, so it may just be a matter of patience while the smart people figure it out lol. But instance-death or long-term community-blackout seems like a risk across the whole fediverse!

Followup question:
If I post content, should I be basically spreading it across several instances to ensure my contributions aren't lost when someone else closes up shop?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The content hosted on the site will be gone. with the mastodon stuff they already have a way to download your content and be able to reupload it on another instance (migrating). but that isn't a thing for lemmy/kbin just yet.

notably, beehaw just announced they're defederating from lemmy.world so go check that drama if you wanna see what happens.

If I post content, should I be basically spreading it across several instances to ensure my contributions aren't lost when someone else closes up shop?

Yeah if all your posts are on a single instance, then naturally when that instance closes that's going away lol. the nature of the fediverse is federation and decentralization so you should just post freely to various instances as you please.

[–] ChemicalRascal 2 points 1 year ago

with the mastodon stuff they already have a way to download your content and be able to reupload it on another instance (migrating).

I don't think you can reupload content, at least not yet. I recently migrated off of home.social, and there wasn't any way to upload the resulting data export at my new Mastodon instance.

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

Yeah, I'm unpacking the beehaw news! I think that's different though, I'm more concerned about a community's content becoming inaccessible (closed, deleted, locked, etc). Beehaw's content is still there, even Lemmy users can still access beehaw content by just visiting.

Yeah if all your posts are on a single instance, then naturally when that instance closes that's going away lol. the nature of the fediverse is federation and decentralization so you should just post freely to various instances as you please.

I guess that's just the "trade off" here? It's a little bit spammier than I usually prefer, but if it's for the sake of enduring content I guess I'll take the deal lol. Everyone post to every instance always!

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

It's not really that different from how reddit has /r/gaming and /r/games that serve pretty much the same purpose. except on the fediverse they're just named the same things but on different instances.

looking at the beehaw/lemmy stuff, there might be [email protected] and [email protected] and they can't access each other's content now because they defederated. If a lemmy.world user followed both, they'd now only see lemmy.world's community. whereas on kbin we're still federated with both, so we'd be able to see and interact with both.

Maybe a bit weird to get used to, but it's just the nature of federation. How you decide to participate in them is entirely up to you, but IMO it's probably just best to use the communities/groups/magazines you like.

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

I mean yeah. What happens if reddit decides to close their instance? Everything is gone too.

In the future they might let people migrate instances. The code just hasn’t been written yet

[–] nosut 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Im interested in this as well. This seems like it might be both a pro and con.

It seem that just because one instance has issues everything doesnt get lost however everything that instance contained could be lost which seems more likely then something like an entire subreddit just being lost.

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

I would think the preferred behavior would be for deleted information to disappear, otherwise malicious and dangerous things could spread without any recourse. But I do get your concern on the "good" data, and have wondered about a way to easily mirror posts that are common. I've seen a cross post button on Lemmy, so maybe if either/both codes can make an easy way to do that to a group of communities at once? Would that possibly cause more noise than be useful?

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

Yeah, I was thinking about that too. Cross-posting seems... different? in the context of the fediverse. There's a very high chance I'm subscribed to @interest@instanceA and @interest@instanceB.

Maybe cross-posting in the fediverse feels more like double-posting? It's one thing to post your pet photos to /r/aww, /r/dogs, and /r/eyebleach. What does it mean to post to @dogs, @dogs, and @dogs?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They seem to be the same thing really. If someone was subscribed to all three of those subreddits, they'd see things tripled just as someone subscribed to the different communities here. I can think of possible fixes like checksums to weed out duplicates, but honestly that's a lot of work so you don't have to ignore a copy of something. Better idea is to use upvotes(favorites) to pick which community you see it first in or think it best fits in. Then the less popular one overall will drop lower.

I do not think we should restrict the flow of content, only be able to control what we see as the end user. Let them post things wherever, and let the communities determine what should be seen more, seen less, or removed if it gets to that case. And just like recent posts about not lurking and contributing, so must users be more proactive in directing what is best and worse in content, and reporting what is definitely not a fit. It's hard, I'm bad about it too, but if you read something and remotely appreciate it, click it up.

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