Comment on Instance freezing as an alternative to full shut down
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
There are projects that will just scrape the whole site. Some of these are used as a build step in producing static sites even.
A static version wouldn’t work with any clients of any kind of course. It would be browser-based with the default or whatever frontend you scraped it with.
I’m not necessarily opposed to this idea. However… and I understand that this opinion is not widely held among lemmy users… IMO the best approach is to just embrace the transience of the fediverse - that’s it’s strength. Instances are easy come easy go. Have multiple accounts on multiple instances and change them according to your mood.
When instance admins choose to move on, they’re not letting us down or whatever. They’ve completed their part of the mission and handing over to someone else.
I don’t know what communities there are on lemm.ee which are about to be discontinued. There might be some that want to keep their content available, but maybe that’s better managed on a community level.
lily33@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
The issue is that currently we don’t have the technical features needed for such an attitude: namely, transfering the communities. Decentralised IDs would also help.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Yeah, again… unpopular opinion but just embrace the transience. How necessary is “transferring” a community. There’s very few communities with content that provides some kind of reference.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Exactly.
If you’re making posts or comments that you want preserved, you should be backing them up anyway.
It would be nice if the export function copied saved items as well as subs and blocks though.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
It does copy saved items.
Penguincoder@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
ActivityPub does not have that feature or ability. Other federation type software does. But being as Lemmy is built with ActivityPub for federation, it can’t offer instance independent identities.
Irelephant@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/…/fep-ef61.md
It does, as an FEP.
veniasilente@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Not just transferring communities, but also posting history (much of what makes a user’s identity).
I’m starting to think that the best way to use Lemmy for posterity is actually the same way as using Reddit for posterity (assuming you’d want to do that): rather than submit your comments directly there, post them in your own blog or smth and just make your lemmy/reddit comments links to your home-comments.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Do people really make comments with that level of gravity though?
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45876780
lily33@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I’d say it doesn’t count unless it also moves all followers, which this doesn’t.
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
It would if all the users were on Piefed instances. I instantly got 100 subscribers on that community as they were Piefed users.