1 yr. ago • 92%

Instance / Server evaporation

In the Fediverse, what is the solution to instances or servers going missing?

To elaborate: The problem with commercial aggregators like Reddit, Twitter/X, Facebook, etc. is enshitification, for one reason or another. Of course, Lemmy, etc. on the Fediverse is the alternative solution, seemingly. But let's say that the hardware for a large Lemmy instance just disappears. What happens to all of the posts? Yes, old posts will still be available for a while on other instances. But, seemingly, there won't be any more updates. How is this addressed?

Moderators would of course be interested in continuing but they may not have the skills and resources to set up the hardware.

Instances/servers can disappear for many reasons: retirement, illness, confiscation, war, bungee jumping or parachuting accident, ... the list goes on.

11 comments

I read a proposal for the ActivityPub spec for shared groups. It means that a group can essentially be hosted from two instances together. But AFAIK the proposal is not yet approved and it needs to be implemented in lemmy for it to work. Right now a community is gone if the instance is gone.

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There is none, except for server mirrors. But most admins don't bother with that. The ultimate solution is to host your own instance. You can do that because the source is available.

But what's the solution to investors dumping reddit, Elon running X into the ground, etc? Not only is there not one, but Reddit hasn't been open source for years, and the only thing that's been opened with X is its recommendation algorithm.

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- Your own instant doesn't solve anything.
  
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  It does somehow, because you are responsible for keeping it online
  
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Thanks for the replies. So I guess USENET had/has an advantage here, as all USENET servers replicate "all" newsgroups automatically. To the extent that one server exists, the newsgroup lives on regardless of its origination point. In that sense, the collective work of all contributors is not lost until the retention date passes.

The ActivityPub proposal mentioned by @chris seems to be a good enough equivalent, at least for communities that are shared.

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