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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 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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[–] [email protected] 3 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.

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.