this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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What happens to communities on instances that goes down? That's where I fear there will be real issues. Unless there's a way for one instance to properly adopt a community in another instance first.
That's definitely my main concern I have with this federated infrastructure. It's basically the same as IMAP email: if the server goes down, your account and everything it's associated with goes down with it.
It's a neat idea and has some benefits, but there really needs to be some sort of backup system in place. Maybe something like mirror instances, where anyone could spin up an instance with the sole purpose of mirroring another instance in case it goes down.
I was thinking this the other day. Without having read the spec, it seems like mirroring should be fairly straightforward - but then once an instance has gone down, how do the users find which mirror is promoted to the new main? Or should the mirrors be treated like backups, and just used to populate a new community on whatever instance is chosen (and then mirror from the new source)?
I'd like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you're on !games@lemmy.ml it can merge with !games@behaw.meh and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.
Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.
That sounds really smart. Let communities decide which instances they federate with. The mod team owns the community, not the instance admins.
Definitely need some kind of replication/mirroring to occur between instances for DR, I was looking at how other decentralized systems for inspiration. Something like RAID where it's tolerant of one or two drive failures could be translated to Lemmy. When you set up a new instance it allows you to opt-in to a peer network where you host backup content from several other instances and your instance is backed up to several other (non-overlapping) instances.
Good question. Not sure what the best procedure might be here. Could be as simple promoting them in order of initial mirror deployment dates and the others become mirrors for the newly activated instance.
Triggering the activation could be a part of an instance decommissioning procedure where the operator selects the mirror to become the successor. Maybe there could be some basic system specs and network performance reporting so they could choose the optimal instance. Users would receive a message that their account is being moved to another instance and domain.
In the event of an unexpected outage, there could be a deadman switch style timeout where the fastest mirror activates automatically after the original instance is out for long enough, but also a process for the operator of the downed instance to delay the takeover by signaling, "I'm working on it." In the event of automatic takeover, since users wouldn't be able to receive messages, there would have to be some sort of global lemmy notice system so users of the downed instance know where to go, like a sticky post on the front page or maybe just a separate "notices" page.
When you say "go down" do you mean what happens if an instance shuts down its servers for good? I think the answer to that is not a technical one. If a sever is owned by an organization (not-for-profit) and it pays it's cloud provider bills, it'll stay up forever.
If you mean what happens if there's a technical issue and the server data is lost, that's a different and solved issue. Create database backups. Easy peasy.
IMHO, the problem is more subtle: nothing on the internet will stay forever, if you find a piece of information you like to save forever, you should save it locally AND with something like internet archive. A community can transfer to the same community in another server with proper forewarning. Finally, mastodon introduced the ability to move your account to another istance manteining your followers for quite a while now, maybe lemmy can find a way to introduce something like that too
Yep. This has been an issue for Mastodon.
No different than when voat went down or when Reddit goes down eventually. The goal is though that by having no big central point of failure it's not as big of a deal. Not like you'd have to get used to a whole new kind of thing, just move to another instance.