this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
18 points (100.0% liked)

Fediverse

2161 readers
46 users here now

Welcome!

Can you imagine, years ago how the internet was before? We know Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, Youtube. We knew blogger, Tumblr, Skyrock... and long before, it was the forum era as phpBB..and mail-lists.

And now with ActivityPub, we are reshaping the web, and achieving much more with lots of freedom. So thank you all, and welcome ๐ŸคŸ๐Ÿ˜

Our threads

Wiki

Resources

Related communities

If you want to donate, double check on the official website and report any problem to mod team

Social network

Threadiverse

Selfhosting on Mobile
Holos | git | donate

FediBlog

Microblog

Event

Mediaverse

Audio

Streaming/live

Book

Culture review

Picture

Podcast

Short-video

Video

FediMarket


Image Credits :
Avatar : Wikipedia Eukombos
Banner : David Revoy licence : CC-BY-4.0

Rules

Moderation process
We all make mistakes,

If your comment is reported, and brings up a complex issue, we will reach out to you and ask you to rephrase it.

Our goal, is to create a serene space for discussion. Nothing more.

If the post isn't edited to remove hurtful language element, we will have to remove it. It would be a shame because your comment was interesting and you took some time to write it.

In case of xenophobia, racism, transphobia, homophobia or harassment, it will be a permanent ban.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Are people backing up the fediverse?

#fediverse

Most fediverse platforms are run by common users, not entities with either monetary, commercial, political or geopolitical interests to keep the platforms alive. But that also means the instances could disappear when money gets tight, if the interest dies out, if there are technical difficulties that are hard to deal with, etc.

This brings me to the opening question, are people taking at least what they find relevant from the fediverse, and backing it up on web archival services, or at least backing up locally as screenshots, HTML/MHTML files, etc., so if their instance or the propagated contents die, at least there is a register the content ever existed?

@fediverse@piefed.social

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Lehmuusa@nord.pub 15 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

This apparently is a problem on Mastodon. But, the Forumverse (PieFed/Lemmy/MBin) has a design that mitigates this.

See for example the case of lemm.ee. It went down. Yet, here's an example of its content being live and (somewhat) kicking: https://lemmy.world/c/movies@lemm.ee .
Their closure was known before, so communities names were appropriately changed.

How the Forumverse works is that each instance that has at least one user subscribed to a comm makes a full copy of all of the comm's text material whenever something gets published there. What, however, goes missing is the ability to propagate the content between instances. That would be the job of lemm.ee, in this case. If you now go and write a comment at https://piefed.social/c/movies@lemm.ee , it will never be visible when viewed from within other instances. In other words, whatever you comment there, will not be visible on https://lemmy.world/c/movies@lemm.ee, because you are not a user of lemmy.world and nobody's there to federate the content.

I wish Forumverse comms had some kind inheritance tag so that a comm could tell what instance should gain the right/responsibility to do the federation work if the comm's original instance is confirmed to have gone belly-up. If that was done, comm's would be essentially eternal. Now it's a bit of a weird situation that you have comms that look completely existant and where it looks like you can even comment, but the comments won't propagate anywhere.

But the content is still there. If you subscribe to a community, it means all of that community's text content (but not images!) will be backed up on your home instance's server.

[โ€“] Blaze@quokk.au 1 points 7 hours ago
[โ€“] Auster@thebrainbin.org 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Small point, but about fetching posts from dead instances, I was able to do it previously by pulling comments' direct links when the commenter is from an external instance. Just don't remember if I did it from Lemmy or Mbin.

[โ€“] Lehmuusa@nord.pub 9 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Nope. There's no other way to fetch those posts than to view them through some instance that already has them. Things will get saved on a Forumverse instance from the moment someone subscribes to the community.

Lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and lemmy.zip are examples of instances that have existed for a long time and are well federated. Almost anything gets backed up by them, because almost any comm has users from those instances.

[โ€“] Auster@thebrainbin.org 0 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

So it must've been Mbin then. All your examples list Lemmy-powered instances, and I did pull some posts through their comments.

[โ€“] Lehmuusa@nord.pub 1 points 3 hours ago

You can manually pull individual posts on PieFed and Lemmy as well. But at least those two don't have a "pull the whole post history" feature per se.

Two PieFed instances do communicate the post history upon subscription. And, I think, comments as well? But PieFed cannot do that with Lemmy.