this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023

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What happens if an instance is deleted to its communities and users? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by god@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I imagine users go poof. Are their profiles stored in other federated instances? Is there a way to recover them or "import from backup" onto another instance?

If they don't have an e-mail I imagine you can't even notify them or authenticate them elsewhere so this "import from backup" even if technically feasible (idk if it is) would be impossible in practice due to authentication issues.

And communities, can you even notify all your subscribers to move to the "backup community" on another instance? I saw yesterday that a Mastodon server host said "I'm deleting this instance in 2 days" or something like that and I started wondering how shit would go on Lemmy.

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[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The devs need to add an account migration feature so that you can export your account to another instance.

Like, when you switch email providers, you just download all your emails and then set up a redirect so people emailing you go to your new account. It should be the same on Lemmy. I hope they add this feature, but I'm sure the devs are really busy right now trying to make sure lemmy.ml doesn't go down tomorrow.

[–] god@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

yeah i've been seeing devs just scaling up massively and still getting hugs of death, pretty fun to watch, probably very much not as fun to experience first-hand. I've had servers die to hugs of death and it's a very stressful experience.

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, must be a very stressful weekend for them as things escalate over at Reddit.

It doesn't sound like the tier 2 instances (aka not lemmy.ml) are very hard to run at least. Lemmy.world said that they're only using a single 8vcpu/32GB VPS.

https://lemmy.world/post/56228

[–] god@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

thanks! my server is smaller than that, thinking of setting one up but kinda bored about it cuz i also have a very busy job and i'm poor so spending money and time on servering would be a bit counter-productive to my current pursuits

on the other hand, it sounds fun, so i might do it anyway for the kekkities

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

At the moment, I'm setting up a Kubernetes config to make it easy to set up and scale, actually! I'm hoping that it helps lower the barrier to entry for people to run their own personal instances.

I would say that hosting a public instance is a very big commitment though, since any users that sign up are depending on you to keep it running indefinitely.

[–] AlgonquinHawk@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

This is pretty significant and needs addressing. There has to be a way of backing up and transferring data to another instance or, once a large instance goes down, I feel a lot of people will jump ship.

[–] RoosterBoy@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Poof, all gone.

[+] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] marian@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

how much storage space would one need on average if you are a hobbyist self-hoster? If I make my own server and, say, it gets a bit popular with thousands or tens of thousands people, all posting text, images and even videos all day, I imagine I will soon run out of places where to put all my hard drives, not to mention the electricity bill...

[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

[–] god@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don’t think there are fully distributed social networks out there today. Even nostr, a Twitter alternative with a basis in blockchain, has the issue that if a “relay” you used to post content goes down, that post disappears. The problem is that all of that data needs to be kept somewhere, and there’s a lot of content to keep.

That's exactly how Hive works by the way, each witness has a copy of the blockchain software, and to run a node and earn money from it, they must "sync" the blockchain and that means running all the blocks software to reproduce all blocks one by one. This process can take hours or days to finish. But afterwards, any node or group of nodes can die and as long as one witness node exists for every microservice (main chain, hive engine side chain for tokens, some metadata chain and there's a few other things ppl have invented idk what for), all data is safe. So as you say, it's expensive and a bit crazy to require everyone to host all the content available but when done it gives some safety to your data.

Hive is not federated tho. It's one thing, just hosted by many with 100% redundance.

Your best bet to protect your account is to self-host.

I was thinking of doing that, setting up my own server, but for some reason all the communities on the server I'm on (sh.itjust.works) are very small and the ones on lemmy.ml grow a lot, so it makes me think that it's much harder for people to find communities hosted on smaller servers than on big ones? Maybe I'm misreading the reasons.> Your best bet to protect your account is to self-host.

[–] Bumble@fedia.io 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can't speak about kbin & Lemmy, however for Mastodon and Calckey there is a feature to export your user data and posts. You can then retain these for reference. Currently there is no ability to import them to a new instance -- the technical reason for this is beyond me, but I believe it's related to the UID of the posts as it is shared across the Fediverse.

People are working on solutions, and I have tested one which works well for Mastodon.

It's very important to have the ability to extract your own data and move

[–] genfood@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

Best would be if there is an app, that would do backups of your posts and content automatically, that if, for whatever reason, the instance goes down. You have first all of your data saved and second you could import it fast onto another instance.