Comment on An admin deleted all my uploads and I have no clue why
Candelestine@lemmy.world 11 months agoUnfortunately, we have no mechanism to prevent bad Instance admins from engaging in bad practices, afaik. People just need to spread the word that that particular Instance might have some bad policies going on, so others can make more informed decisions.
It’s an inherent challenge to decentralization though. If anyone can make an Instance, then how can you verify that the Instance you were putting your community on was run by trustworthy, reliable people? In these early stages especially, when nobody has known anyone else for very long.
All that said, I am still hoping this is some kind of innocent mistake or technical bug. But I am completely unable to say. I do know a fair bit about Lemmy, but I’m not a self-hoster or other expert user that might know the ins and outs of the back end.
JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Right, and I feel like that’s a big part of what OP is doing here. I think we just have to let the reputational dust settle and go with that flow.
What I’m also concerned about is what kind of failsafe the big instances have. For example, if something happened to my instance-runner and the place went down, federation would only help so much. So altho the content would be preserved, all those communities would be dead in the water, and their subscribers lost. That would be a terrible blow after months or even years of building them up, plus providing content, which is what I’ve been doing steadily for two months now at my place. If I had to start over at another instance, I don’t think I’d have the heart, even though I’ve tried to locally archive everything, including a good chunk of the reviews I write by hand.
Yup, hopefully. On the surface it’s a disastrous one, and the admin I’m talking to has put in a ticket, at the least. But it’s turning in to a good bit of hard work we didn’t need to manually restore some of the lost image content. Most of the content is gone however, despite the posts being restored.
Whole situation bloody well sucks, and wasn’t helped by my colleague OP receiving no communication or explanation of any kind. AFAIK they *still* haven’t been contacted, so we’re talking at least two major failures on the part of LW.
Candelestine@lemmy.world 11 months ago
When dealing with a volunteer project, even a large one, I would allow multiple days for communication.
They do not have a staff and structure like a company would, so we cannot hold them to the same standards, that is not reasonable.
We’re probably always going to get fairly bad customer support here, most likely. Unless they start charging a fee or putting in a lot of ads or something.
JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 11 months ago
I understand and agree with those things, but disagree that OP’s situation fits that kind of model. No, in this case it was a slew of LW failures that I should think would drive most victims away, no matter the setting.
Consider:
Understanding and excusing part of that due to the volunteer nature of LW is one thing, but IMO this is a next-level clusterfluff.
Indeed, I understand that LW previously put a lot of effort in to attracting Rexxiters, to some degree at the expense of other instances, and maybe this is what it looks like when there isn’t enough staff & process to handle the magnitude of userbase the instance runners desired. Maybe that’s something to consider as well, when volunteers sign up for a project.
Candelestine@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I do not think it is wise to consider more things until we have more perspectives on what happened. Is any of this time sensitive, and requires to be addressed today?