I think this is a little too glib about instances shutting down. If this happened it would lose not only my subscription list but also many of my favorite communities. It would take quite a bit of work to reconstruct what was lost.
Comment on Who owns the servers for Lemmy?
EndOfLine@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Is each instance like another person with a server?
Yeah. I would assume that most, if not all, open instances are going through a 3rd party hosting service, but nothing stopping them from being hosted on hardware in somebodies home.
Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?
Yup. Anytime and for any reason. It might cause a moment of disruption, but the beauty of federation is that you can always setup an account on a new instance or create your own.
Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?
Yes. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Facebook federating their Threads services. I’m sure that there are others.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
Tanoh@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You can export the list of subscribed communities in 0.19.
If you do that every now and then a shutdown would still hurt. As all the communities hosted on it would be lost but at least you can import your subscription list on another server.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
Oh I should do that, thanks for the tip. That said, I think the loss of communities is the bigger issue.
Hopefully major instances if and when they shut down would communicate this well in advance to allow for an orderly migration.
whoreticulture@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Thanks, helps a lot!
If an instance is closed, would everyone’s accounts and posts on there be lost?
tunetardis@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Accounts, yes. Posts, not necessarily. I joined during the great Reddexodus, when the influx caused several instances to go down temporarily. What I recall happening was the communities that were mirrored to other instances still had accessible posts and comments, but they were essentially frozen? Like you couldn’t contribute any more to them without the host instance coming back online.
I think the way it works is if you are the first to subscribe to a community from a non-local instance, its content gets synced to yours, which adds some resilience in case that the remote instance goes down. At least that’s my impression of how it works.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 6 months ago
Is frustrating on a new instance though when you have to wait for the content to appear though, lol