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What to do when communities die? (discuss.online)

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

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Hello,

There is a unique problem of the fediverse. When an instance goes offline, its communities will never sync again.

Recently, vlemmy.com shutdown. Quite a few communities synced with discuss.online and other instances. Because vlemmy.com is not longer brokering communication, these communities will never be in sync again.

We have a several options:

Leave them there. Do nothing.
Leave them there but make a post that it's dead and hope people see it.
Purge the communities. Act like they never existed.
Build some elaborate system to work around vlemmy being gone. This would take a lot of work and collaboration with other instances.

Let me know what makes the most sense to you as users. Are any of you still using vlemmy communities? What about long-term planning? Maybe this isn't an issue now but what if lemmy.world vanished?

Please, let me know what you think. I'm torn on this one.

Thanks, Jason

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think the ideal solution would be devising some way for the content to live on cached in other servers and continue to sync comments and upvotes among them. It would be a shame for useful content to go away, and allowing for communities and instances to rise and fall and live and die seems like something decentralized content should expect to happen without leaving information holes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This would be much easier if the original owners of the instances helped bring it down. Their servers have private keys that verify ownership of the content for the fediverse to work in a trustworthy way.

Without these keys the content has to stay in a sort of read-only state.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

My initial thought was to build an archive server that grabs all the federated instances' content via the public APIs. Then each instance would then have the option to purge after. However, this prevents folks from discovering it. Unless they are aware of the archive. I bought the domain lemmy.rehab for this. Perhaps, we could even create an instance that hosts only a backend for these dead communities that no one owns. Then moderation would be a nightmare.

The second option was post a sticky post that said this community was dead and no longer synced. But for how long is that useful? What if someone finds a post from years ago and comments and never visits the main feed to see it's dead?

Another option is to put in a request for the core devs to have archived communities. Read-only. However, these communities will remain in a constant out-of-sync status. Comments and posts on discuss.online will never show on lemmy.world or the other way around.

I'm not certain of any option.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like 3. acknowledge it's dead, maybe provide a re-direct to a child community

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This assumes they can find that post. They'd never know if someone searches and lands on a post and not the feed. Or if they only look at their main feed and never review the community.

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