What happens if an Fediverse instance goes down? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by zephyr@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Can other instances "back it up" so that the posts submitted to the instances aren't lost?

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[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Anything pushed to the "fediverse", if you will, can't be lost (except for images and other media). It's just that once an instance goes down, that instance isn't available anymore to push out new updates. So if someone replies to a post or comment that belongs to a community that "no longer exists", then that reply will only exist on the server of the user who posted it.

[-] veroxii@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

So a bit like a netsplit in the IRC days. Yes I'm aware IRC is still alive and kicking. 😄

[-] 4am@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

A net split in the EFNet days ;)

Man, why don’t we do IRC anymore? It was like the OG federated service…

[-] TheInsane42@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I'm still on irc, efnet. ;)

[-] MrGeekman@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

We still do sometimes. You’d be surprised by how many IRC channels still exist.

[-] Zana@va11halla.bar 1 points 1 year ago

My old instance was deleted by the admin and all the posts are still possible to reach via other instances. Well maybe some got lost that maybe didn't get fetched by others, I'm not sure, but when I wanted to go back and save the posts that were "lost" they were there at least.

[-] TheOneCurly@lemmy.theonecurly.page 0 points 1 year ago

Based on what we saw when beehaw de-federated from lemmy.world, communities still exist on all remote servers that previously saw it, including any posts that were already there.

The only unknown is if those communities will exist indefinitely. I don't think there is currently any mechanism for cleaning up instance data but there might be in the future. It would be a good idea to have that as an explicit option for admins.

[-] RxBrad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

beehaw de-federated from lemmy.world

What's the deal with that? Is this the part where I learn that I'm a giant racist simply for being on this instance?

[-] 4am@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Not that I know of! The story is that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works saw huge growth at the start of the Reddit blackout. To the tune of several dozen thousands of users.

Most of those users were cool.

Some where not and caused problems. With the sudden scaling, weaknesses in the moderation system of Lemmy became apparent, both from a functional and from a manpower standpoint.

So in order to keep their instance appealing, beehaw defederated as they could not keep up with the (minority of, but still significant) problematic activity.

This defederation is supposed to be temporary, and once these instances get sign-up under control, bots wrangled, and Lemmy’s overall moderation tools improve, they would want to again federate with as many instances as possible.

A lot of users hear about the situation and just say “oh are those instances bad?” or “beehaw are being crybabies and ruining the fediverse!” But I think both of those opinions are a bit shortsighted. Sure it’s not a great situation but no one is acting out of malice (except the jerk trolls) and everyone is (last I knew) doing whatever work is needed to remedy the situation, regardless of how long it might take.