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Unfortunately, the popular MedMastodon server, dedicated to doctors and medicine, unexpectedly shut down at the end of 2025.
(poliverso.org)
Unfortunately, the popular MedMastodon server, dedicated to doctors and medicine, unexpectedly shut down at the end of 2025.
The speed with which it happened prevented users from accessing their data, highlighting the risks of decentralized social media without backups. Its administrator ceased operations, causing confusion and data loss for many healthcare professionals who had signed up as an alternative to Twitter.
This event serves as a reminder: Wherever you are on Mastodon, back up your data!
WARNING: To help Med-mastodon users who have returned to the Fediverse, the Poliverso staff has created the Friendica group @medmastodon
If you follow this group, you can:
- Follow it and mention it in your messages, and it will reshare all your public posts addressed to it (this only applies to an initial message, not a reply to another message).
- Follow it only to read all the messages from fellow doctors who send messages through it.
Why doesn't centralized social media without backups have this problem?
Traditional social media is run for-profit and thus has an incentive to keep their website online as much as possible to keep their company alive by gaining users and revenue. And I would bet they do have backups. Hobby websites like fediverse projects often are can be run by any flaky nobody that can have varying motives and varying data retention practices.
Any city council or minor public service or library could run their own instance, though, alongside the usual website. This doesn't have to be a hobbyist thing or for-profit enterprise.
It doesn't have to be, but by nature of anyone being able to spin one up, people will end up on hobby instances.
A library running one is a great idea. Seems well aligned with their purpose.
But the point is that this is specifically about the problem without backup, so either we compare apples to apples or bannanas to monkeys.
Bananas 🍌 are sweet, monkeys are not (don't ask how I know 🙊).
They did.
There's almost hundreds of dead social media that inaccessible, some even have zero backups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services
Oh, that reminds me of this list: https://indieweb.org/site-deaths
Usually they have VC money to burn through
And/or they get bought by the competition.