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What happens to orphaned communities when their host instance dies?
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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If I understand the fediverse correctly, if the instance dies (meaning all the background servers are taken away), everything on that instance is gone; accounts, communities, posts, comments. Since the instance is the host, they are the ones holding the data; if they decide to stop, it's gone.
However, the creator of the community and its members could create new accounts on another instance to rebuild the community.
When that's the case, wouldn't it be nice to be able to migrate communities, so when an adminndecides to quit an instance, those communities that want to move can arrange that move.
I agree that would be nice. Hopefully it is something that will eventually get added as a possibility, but I don't know enough about the background workings to say if it is being considered or not.
I can't imagine that archiving and instance migration aren't on the hub roadmap, but they're probably well beyond the horizon.
Nascent tech rarely prioritizes development for contingencies like it's own decay/demise.
Bad mojo. ๐
Afaik posts and comments are copied locally to federated instances so if the original went down you could still access what was once there from some other instance.
E.g everything (excluding uploaded images/videos) on https://sopuli.xyz/c/technology@beehaw.org would still be there without beehaw.
Once a user on instance A subscribes to a community on instance B, then instance A starts caching posts from the community on B. But to my understanding it doesn't retroactively fetch all historical posts and comments.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !technology@beehaw.org](https://sopuli.xyz/c/technology@beehaw.org)
The accounts are gone-
But, communities, posts, comments are all replicated. With a single flip of a bit, you can take that cached copy, and turn it into a local community.
Users would need to re-subscribe/follow/etc, but, all of the data would be there.
I'm hoping for account linking so you can have multiple synced accounts between instances so if one goes down due to load or permanently you can seamlessly continue without any issue.
I think it needs the ability for multiple hosts to opt in to co-hosting a community. It could work as a cache and provide some redundancy if something goes down, temporarily or permanently.