this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
17 points (81.5% liked)
Fediverse
28351 readers
459 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If an instance goes down (permanently), federation of all of the communities hosted by that instance essentially stop. The content that has already been posted remains but anything new added to those communities only remain on your home instance. The only way for federation to resume is for that instance to come back online with the same domain it started with.
This seems majorly flawed. If lemmy.world went down we would then loose a lot information/posts.
Shouldn’t there be a timeout period of some sort, or a way to open a new community of the same name on another instance? Maybe even a backup instance? So say for example
A community on lemmy.ml is created. Let’s call it awesome-community. The moderators of awesome-community set backup of awesome-community to lemmy.world awesome-community. Then all instances on fediverse will see that information and if a user tries to view awesome-community lemmy.ml and it says offline then it redirects to awesome-community on lemmy.world.
I think having redirects for offline communities would be great. Even if you could set a timeout feature so say after 24hrs offline redirect. If not been 24hrs then just show it’s offline.
Think of Lemmy as email. Each post or comment is just an email sent to a distribution group (a community). If your email server goes down, all of those users and distribution groups are gone. Now I'll still have the emails I sent to you in my email box but you won't be able to see them as your email server is offline. Sure you could create a new account on a new server but you'd have to tell everyone about your new address (federate) but there's nothing to associate your old user with your new one and there's no way to backfill data. I could reply-all or forward (comment) on to your new address but there's still no way to associate those old posts with your new account.