This is a big problem. It creates the illusion that /c/cats on one particular instance is the real /c/cats.
This is the root of re-centralization and it must be pulled out.
When using email, be aware that
george@aol.comis the real George. All other Georges on all other email servers are fake.I think part of the issue is that all the different Lemmy and kbin instances are trying to be Reddit themselves. By which I mean there are a bunch of instances with no focus. They’re all “kitchen sink” instances, each with their own Politics, Tech, Cats, etc.
Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin.social, fedia.io. All of them are generic reddit alternatives, but the real reddit alternative is the amalgamation of subscriptions from multiple more focused instances.
Startrek.website is a great example of the opposite: it’s an instance focused on one topic, where some people will want to sign up as a user and others will want to just subscribe to one of their three (!) boards from their own instance. They don’t need their own Politics topic, users on the site that care about it will subscribe to a politics topic from another instance. The startrek admins and mods only have to care about their one focus.
My ideal fediverse feed would be pulling individual topics from a few dozen more focused instances instead of one generalist instance. I think that’s what’s going to end up happening.
This is not a communication problem. Communities are indeed centralized and if an instance is shut down permanently or loses its data all the communities are gone. This is a big design problem of Lemmy.
Edit: it’s sometimes possible to rebuild new communities on another instance and recover past messages that have been replicated on other instances (if there were full replicas) but this requires all users and moderators to agree on where to migrate and avoid splits and so on.
Not 100%-
If, I subscribe to !lemmy@lemmy.ml on my instance, it replicates a copy of everything to me.
When lemmy.ml goes down, I can indeed still see and browse the content here. I can even comment/interact with it, (and, when lemmy.ml goes up- the changes should sync back to it)
What you are describing is just a local cache of !lemmy@lemmy.ml on your instance and it works only if it has been populated before the downtime of lemmy.ml. If lemmy.ml never comes back to life nobody can post to !lemmy@lemmy.ml proper. All the communities on in would be dead.
Its actually possible to take the local copy, and set it as a local community…
With a few database commands.
So, migrating communities from offline servers is possible as long as it was federated and synced beforehand
That’s besides the point. Of course it’s always possible to create new communities on new instances, and import posts from various sources, but the original community would be still gone.
If an instance is shut down or becomes unusable for a long time there is no way to automatically migrate users to a new instance. Additionally, there is also no guarantee that all users will move to the same alternative instance. This can also cause unnecessary conflict around which alternative instance becomes the “legitimate” successor.
Looking at it that way- you are correct, and there really isn’t a way to fix that.
I am just providing an alternative. That being, if you were subscribed to say, lemmy.ml/c/mycommunity, and lemmy.ml went down-
You CAN run a few commands, and convert lemmy.ml/c/mycommunity to a locally hosted community on your instance, without too much effort.