TL;DR, Feddit.UK is down, we’re working on making a fun replacement!
A number of days ago, feddit.uk had kicked the bucket.
The community on there had noticed months ago that the owner was inactive. This was around September (Going off of memory). So they arranged to set up a new community run by the same feddit.uk admins (except the owner, the only one who had host access) which would replace it. However, on the weekend as Quackhouse was going to be launched, the owner responded to an email and made two users admins. Emperor and GreatAlbatross. However, they did not have access to the console, just lemmy adminship. Ever since, the owner has been AWOL. The community were too afraid to go back to setting up Quackhouse incase the owner showed up again.
Unfortunately, that wariness and being afraid led to the worst case scenario happening - Feddit.uk has dropped offline. We believe the instance has reached some form of file size cap. It was basically an aeroplane flying with dead pilots before then. And it appears that aeroplane has crashed.
If you are from the feddit.uk refugee base, please join the new community whenever it is ready. Do not sign up now. We are busy and still setting up and don’t want an influx of new users just yet.
For now, sit tight. I’ll update this post whenever it’s up and running and ready for sign-ups. I am not posting the name for now so we don’t get overrun with sign ups. But we would love to invite you back to our community when it’s set up.
The new community will have it’s own unique identity that doesn’t have to piggyback off of Lemmy and Reddit for it’s name. But it will still aim to be the main UK lemmy instance that feddit.uk was. By all means, it will be a full lemmy instance, still federated, etc. It should be the same experience as feddit.uk. But we actually do have fun plans to create a nice sense of identity with that instance if all goes well! I will warn you, it does have a silly name, but that was the name that was decided upon.
We look forward to having new members. All are welcome, whether or not you were from Feddit.UK or not. We will have the theme be a UK-based lemmy instance.
I’ll try and remember to update this post when we are ready.
~20CX12
Wow. If this isn’t a perfect example of the possible problems with federated networks I don’t know what is.
I’m still for it of course. But it has to be done right and this is far from that.
Twitter could go permanently offline tomorrow as well, for all we know.
I sure hope it does, nobody needs that cesspool.
It is looking increasingly likely that at some point it will just collapse.
it is possible now to copy your data to another account on another instance.
in the future lemmy might even support something like having your account automatically backed up to another instance. Similar to a backup email address at your main email address.
It’s possible to backup your data, but you have to do it beforehand. There’s no chance to save your data once the server goes down.
What data do you want backed up though ?
Would it be difficult for apps to do it automatically? Just have a constant backup hosted on your phone or cloud account?
That is something that should be possible: Choosing a backup sync server that have my data(profile). I hope they implement that
Profile backup would be so cool! I’m super for it.
Big problem with lemmy in particular is that communities are server based and so if you lose the server you lose the whole community.
On mastodon, if I talk to person 1@a.com and person 2@b.com and a.com goes down, I can still talk to person 2@b.com. on lemmy, I might be talking to both in community@c.com and if that server goes down I’m no longer in a community with person 1 or person 2 despite a.com and b.com both being up.
All the instances that popped up during the reddit exodus were not that thought through. Once the feddiverse stabelize around sustainable communities it’ll work better
What do you mean by “not that thought through”?
Somehow a lot of instance admins didn’t really thought through how much work this is and for how long. It takes a lot of time and effort to actually do this right. They underestimated what it takes to run even a medium-sized instance in the long run.
I expect there are instances running on old laptops in someone’s basement. Once the novelty wears off they will get forgotten by admins and die. Power costs, admin overhead, will put some off continuing to host as time goes on. But it’s like a hydra, more will pop up and life continues on. I’m lucky that I work in IT and have equipment hosted at the DC for little cost, so self hosting my Lemmy access is cool in a geeky kind of way.
It’s not a problem with federated platforms, it’s a problem with any new platform.
Anything that’s been around for less than a year is not too likely to stick around for a year.
Something that’s been around for 10 years is likely to stick around for another year.
Time will filter out the instances that stick and the ones that don’t. Users will go to the older instances because those are the ones they can trust to still be up for the foreseeable future.
I think it shows some of the strengths of federated networks. If the owners of a small proprietary social network ghosted their project, it would take a huge effort to try to replace it, which would be insurmountable for many communities. But in this case, a community can fork onto a new server pretty quickly and seamlessly.
Hard disagree. This is a problem every web service has had to deal with since the beginning of the web: what happens when a host (either the machine or the person) stops working? How do you keep the service up?
Centralized services solve that problem with internally funded, transparent redundancy. Federation solves the problem with externally funded, highly-visible redundancy. They’re still the same solution, just a different way of going about it.
You could argue that user identity is lost due to the discontinuity between instances, but that’s probably something the Lemmy devs could fix without too much hassle.