Submitted 2 years ago by lemmy_check_that@lemmy.ml to asklemmy@lemmy.ml
After seeing what happend on r/antiwork over at Reddit. Does Lemmy have a way to prevent somthing similar, like could another instance decide to preserve a deleted community and not have a single point of failure?
The same question can be asked if an instance suddenly closes down, can other instances keep the communities alive?
Maybe I am wrong here but I think it's not a big deal. If people can't joint a new sub if one crashes they weren't very involved anyways so it's mostly about imagined reach that's lost.
If an instance goes down, then pretty all much all data on that server will not be accessible. So the communities, posts and users on that instance will be gone.
Maybe lemmy can implement something similar to the matrix protocol.
Matrix is really a decentralised conversation store rather than a messaging protocol. When you send a message in Matrix, it is replicated over all the servers whose users are participating in a given conversation - similarly to how commits are replicated between Git repositories. There is no single point of control or failure in a Matrix conversation which spans multiple servers:
If an instance goes down, then pretty all much all data on that server will not be accessible.
Also wanna add, that if any servers have been federating with communities that live on a dead server, they will still have a backup of all those pushed posts and comments ( which starts happening immediately after one person subscribes to that remote community).
GNU Social has proposed a mechanism for sharing a group between multiple instances: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-8485-unbound-actor/2200
But as I understand it, it assumes such a group wouldn't have moderators at all
That would dramatically increase server resources necessary though
I think the only solution really is probably to self host. Or, for multiple instances to have duplicate instances and to cross post on all the communities. You already see this happening, especially with COVID communities across Lemmy and Lotide, but also with news and tech communities I think
Some more relevant discussion: https://lemmy.ml/post/161629
AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml 2 years ago
The admins have the ability to and reserve the right to appoint a new head mod. We actually do it semi often on Lemmy.ml, you can request to become the mod of a community if it has no mods, or all the mods have been inactive for several months.