If an instance were to leave the fediverse do we loose all its data? Say for example iPad Lenny.ml domain was seized or was forced to shutdown so we loose all communities from that host? Do we not see any posts? Can we still post to it? Seems like a big flaw if we have multiple large instances that can shutdown a significant portion of Lemmy.
We lose the communities from that instance, yes. And that’s why people want to make sure you don’t have one dominant instance on the threadiverse. But frankly that issue will be there unless you have a fully decentralised system.
That being said, other instances will have a cache of the activities happening on this other instance. You can then fairly easily recreate it from this cache, and if you have a lot of storage, can also have a limitless cache.
If an instance goes down (permanently), federation of all of the communities hosted by that instance essentially stop. The content that has already been posted remains but anything new added to those communities only remain on your home instance. The only way for federation to resume is for that instance to come back online with the same domain it started with.
This seems majorly flawed. If lemmy.world went down we would then loose a lot information/posts.
Shouldn’t there be a timeout period of some sort, or a way to open a new community of the same name on another instance? Maybe even a backup instance? So say for example
A community on lemmy.ml is created. Let’s call it awesome-community. The moderators of awesome-community set backup of awesome-community to lemmy.world awesome-community. Then all instances on fediverse will see that information and if a user tries to view awesome-community lemmy.ml and it says offline then it redirects to awesome-community on lemmy.world.
I think having redirects for offline communities would be great. Even if you could set a timeout feature so say after 24hrs offline redirect. If not been 24hrs then just show it’s offline.
Think of Lemmy as email. Each post or comment is just an email sent to a distribution group (a community). If your email server goes down, all of those users and distribution groups are gone. Now I’ll still have the emails I sent to you in my email box but you won’t be able to see them as your email server is offline. Sure you could create a new account on a new server but you’d have to tell everyone about your new address (federate) but there’s nothing to associate your old user with your new one and there’s no way to backfill data. I could reply-all or forward (comment) on to your new address but there’s still no way to associate those old posts with your new account.
It is indeed a flaw, though it is in itself already a fix for the single-instance services, such as Reddit.
If an instance becomes unavailable/defederated on the fediverse, a large portion of content will become unavailable, but the service will still be functional. If a single-instance service becomes unavailable, or if the admins do something stupid, ALL data will be jeopardized.
I know that this might not be the answer you seek, but I think it helps adding perspective to the problem.
Lenny? Lenny?
If we lose Lenny we still have Carl.
