What happens when an instance shuts down. Can the spaces/subreddits whatver they are called be recreated? If so, how?

  • sexy_animal_fucker@kbin.melroy.org
    8·
    8 hours ago

    If you don’t export or migrate your data elsewhere before this happens, your account goes bye-bye

    Everything can be recreated by an entity that perfectly remembers or recorded everything about it otherwise it’s gone forever

  • uuj8za@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    Can the spaces/subreddits whatver they are called

    They’re called communities or comms.

    • jamin@lemmy.zipOP
      5·
      8 hours ago

      I mean are the posts in any way recreatable because they are also saved on other instances when accessed from there right? Of course you can create another community with the same topic :D

      • CameronDev@programming.dev
        6·
        6 hours ago

        I don’t believe there is a way to transfer posts. You could probably create a bot that scrapes and recreates them, but all the original users would be lost. Best to just start from scratch, nothing here needs to be permanent anyway.

      • sexy_animal_fucker@kbin.melroy.org
        8·
        8 hours ago

        Without a self destruct cleanup the posts and data will likely remain in the caches of other instances but the account is effectively gone for the original user

  • ExtremeDullard@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    We’ll soon find out: SDF’s Lemmy instance seems to have snuffed it permanently. It’s been performing really poorly - and been inaccessible - for as long as I’ve known it, but now I think SDF just doesn’t give a rat’s ass at all anymore.

    Unfortunately, I have 2 communities there that I was planning on migrating to Piefed soon, and it might be too late. Hopefully it’ll come back online long enough for me to save them at some point 🙁

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    7 hours ago

    At least for Lemmy – I have no idea about kbin or other ActivityPub software – there isn’t a user-accessible way to back up one’s account on an instance, nor to preserve any communities that you’re a mod for. So yeah, if the instance goes down unexpectedly like due to data loss or an FBI raid, the communities and users that were on that instance will disappear.

    It’s true that other servers will have a cache of some of the existing community posts and the users on the departed server. But it’s exactly that: a cache, which will eventually be evicted.

    A similar situation occurs when a Lemmy instance changes domain name: all prior posts to the community (and the community itself) were homed to the old domain. So a new domain cannot have the same identity as the old; it will simply be a separate entity, even if all posts were somehow preserved and reposted on the new instance.

    Is this Lemmy-specific? No, Mastodon and I think all other ActivityPub software, plus BlueSky have this property, because they anchor identities to DNS names. From that, the posts to a community are anchored to the instance, and the instance is anchored to DNS.

    So if the domain is lost, then it’s game over. But if the domain is still there but the disk got wiped, then it would be a matter of recovery from a backup. You do have a 3-2-1 backup strategy, right?

    I will note that Mastodon has a user-initiated export feature, which functions as a backup, something that Lemmy doesn’t have. A Mastodon user can export their data and then move their identity to a new instance. Lemmy can’t do that today, but it should be possible. Though in both cases, only the saved account is preserved. To restore a Lemmy community would require a disk-level backup image.

    (this is all conjecture based on my limited knowledge of Lemmy. A better answer would come from an instance admin or one of the Lemmy devs)