If an instance goes down, then so do all the communities on it. Perhaps it the future, you could be able to migrate a community or an account to another instance. I know Mastodon has a future for migrating an account.
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Migrating profiles should be possible at some point in the future, as well and importing and exporting content profiles. Not necessarily comments or posts, but your follows and subscriptions.
Regarding communities themselves, posts and comments, that's much trickier but it's feasible that the Lemmy community will develop a way to:
A) Archive content in such a way that it's read only and requires super low resources to host by interested internet archivists. B) but which is still connected to the fediverse so that the original content authors, after authenticating somehow, can request deletion of specific content
Ideally we'd want to associate each Lemmy account to a unique random public key and sign each post or comment with a secret key that only you know. Maybe your instance can hold the key in encrypted form and deliver it to your browser to decrypt with a simple password so that the user doesn't have to care about any of this. To them it would still be username and password.
Anyways, this would allow you to still authenticate yourself in the far future when your instance no longer exists and request deletion of whatever content you wrote in the past.
There is no community migration feature to Lemmy and I don't foresee that being feasible in the near future. Same with personal profiles.
There should be a migrating feature for profiles IMO. Would really help with speed if the server is hosted near to you.
I agree. Even if it just means exporting your settings and subscriptions as a JSON and importing it elsewhere. Mastodon has a more "proper" migration feature that would work better for communities, but I'm not sure how well that'd scale to Lemmy which has much more posts per community than Mastodon will per user.
That’s interesting. If a server goes down or the admin shuts it down for whatever reason, some major communities will be lost. Is it supposed to be like this or am I missing something?
Major communities would be lost if any site decides to shutdown. With the fediverse, it's easier for communities to spring back up since anyone could create the same community on another server and pick up from where the last one left off.
The fediverse isn't meant to ensure communities exist forever, its meant to make them difficult to control by a small group of people.
Major communities would be lost if any site decides to shutdown.
Yes, I agree. But coming from Reddit, which is centralised and for profit, they have to ensure that their servers run full time.
On the open source side, i.e., here at Lemmy, anyone can build an instance. Which is great for a lot of reasons. But, hypothetically let’s say I have an instance and I can’t bear up the cost of running the server. I would like to close the server down and there exists communities with thousands of users. Then what?
I know it’s easier to spring the communities back up, but it’s just starting again from scratch, and also losing all the important information that had been posted on it.
EDIT: Also what about profiles that were made on that instance? Well the data would be completely lost right?
You're right that for-profit companies like Reddit have a strong monetary incentive to maintain their platform, which doesn't exist for anyone hosting a Lemmy instance. However, it depends on what you as a user is wanting from these platforms.
Reddit wants to make money and they will do whatever they want to achieve that goal. That isn't always going to be in the best interest of their users.
Lemmy's devs state one of their main goals is to avoid individuals or small groups from exerting too much control over the platform: Lemmy Docs
I get the sense that you're looking for some kind of online permanency. Maybe you'd be interested in a data hoarding community? As for myself, I've had many accounts on many forums and site over the years. Most don't exist anymore, and that's okay! I'm gonna be honest, I don't think I'd really want to read my 15 year old posts anyways...
EDIT: Also what about profiles that were made on that instance? Well the data would be completely lost right?
Yes. The user accounts would also be gone. Users would need to make completely new accounts on another server. Again, I'm fine with my current Lemmy account being ethereal. I think everything in life is to some extent.
I don’t think I’d really want to read my 15 year old posts anyways…
Lol
Yes. The user accounts would also be gone.
Well, I see. All I’m worried about some essential piece of information which could be useful for people will be lost. As an aspiring dev, you do sometimes spiral down into the Reddit hole, for getting a solution.
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