Do they get adopted by other instances? Are they still accessible from other instances? Can you still post on them from another instance?
Edit: From my understanding every instance that deals with a community has a cached copy. Will that copy disappear after a certain time, because it can’t phone to home anymore?
As of Lemmy 0.18.1, cached copies on other instances do not disappear if the original instance has died.
In theory, it might even be possible to actually clone a cached copy into a new local community. This would require some database hacking, so not recommended unless you’re familiar with Lemmy code and SQL.
It’s actually extremely easy to flip a remote community, into being a “local” one.
The modern-day equivalent of “what happens to a dream deferred?”
Lemmy is instanced. if the host “dies” everthing else dies with it. even the accounts and everything. as far as i understand it. maybe there will be a few cached posts from that instance but im not sure about that.
This is going to make it impossible for any technical help communities to take root. The fact that the whole thing can just go poof completely turns me off from using something like that.
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I understand what you’re saying, but I feel more concerned with the stability of instances due to the fact that they’re run by everyday people as something to do, they already have lives and jobs outside of this. Maybe it’s a passion project they pour a lot into, but the possibility of it crashing down for various reasons is a lot higher than a larger centralized service run by companies whose soul purpose is to run that service.
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This.
If we don’t want things run so as to squeeze every ounce of value out of users, then things can’t be run by profit-seeking entities. They basically need to be run by altruistic people doing it for pro-social reasons, or we stay on the enshitification train.
If people are really invested in a community remaining a forever space on the internet, we just need to develop the features for migrating those communities to new instances, and then having that community shell out for their own host.
That is where stability will come from. Communities self-hosting.
It’ll never happen, centralised means stable. Just check out what this company called Google have built!
They are currently working hard to discontinue your favourite Google service.
And they’re being sarcastic.
RIP Google Reader
https://killedbygoogle.com/
RIP RIP RIP
I get the concern, but long term persistence is probably a rarity. The internet is still young. If anything a federated group of communities that are linked somehow will last far longer than a single server of even a large corporation. For the weeks that Lemmy et al have been growing, how to best develop communities that connect and last has been an ongoing question.
The internet is still young.
In what world is 40 years “young”?
The internet as most people know it and as companies depend on it isn’t that old.
The difference being discussed here is a single existence vs. potential for redundancy. The best way for something to outlive even the places it’s stored is by repetition. That goes against both how we’ve grown things so far on the internet as well as the talk about competition among instances and the biggest one wins. It’s far better for there to be many groups that share information in some way but are their own entities and aren’t dependent on the rest.
If I understand the fediverse correctly, if the instance dies (meaning all the background servers are taken away), everything on that instance is gone; accounts, communities, posts, comments. Since the instance is the host, they are the ones holding the data; if they decide to stop, it’s gone.
However, the creator of the community and its members could create new accounts on another instance to rebuild the community.
The accounts are gone-
But, communities, posts, comments are all replicated. With a single flip of a bit, you can take that cached copy, and turn it into a local community.
Users would need to re-subscribe/follow/etc, but, all of the data would be there.
I’m hoping for account linking so you can have multiple synced accounts between instances so if one goes down due to load or permanently you can seamlessly continue without any issue.
When that’s the case, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to migrate communities, so when an adminndecides to quit an instance, those communities that want to move can arrange that move.
I agree that would be nice. Hopefully it is something that will eventually get added as a possibility, but I don’t know enough about the background workings to say if it is being considered or not.
I can’t imagine that archiving and instance migration aren’t on the hub roadmap, but they’re probably well beyond the horizon.
Nascent tech rarely prioritizes development for contingencies like it’s own decay/demise.
Bad mojo. 😆
Afaik posts and comments are copied locally to federated instances so if the original went down you could still access what was once there from some other instance.
E.g everything (excluding uploaded images/videos) on https://sopuli.xyz/c/[email protected] would still be there without beehaw.Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]](https://sopuli.xyz/c/[email protected])
