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This is one of many reasons I tell people not to become overly attached to their Lemmy accounts. You don’t know what or who’s hosting your instance and it could just abruptly disappear overnight.
It will be good when there is an easy way to back up and restore your subs, your blocks and possibly even your comments. If you wish to change instances, it should be easy.
This would be great. I get the value of having instances be separated but starting over is a real pain.
Maybe something about account creation: create the account only for this instance or create it for all/select number of instances? Even something like 5-10 instances “holding onto” your account could prevent things from disappearing without warning unless something really bad went down.
Spitballing here, since my understanding of how this works is ehhhhhhhhh…
Honestly this is part of the reason I’ve been thinking of spinning up my own instance. Literally just so I have control of the instance my account belongs to.
That is why I did it! Not only for, let’s say, a service that stops, but also for the case where an Admin would decide to go in a direction I don’t want to go.
I’m hoping one day we’ll have federated account management as part of the Fediverse so that you don’t have to spin up a whole Lemmy instance and can create communities that are attached to that.
The problem with hosting your own instance is that you can’t create a community in another one.
And since they are a central aspect of Lemmy, your experience can still suffer if the instance with one of your favorite communities goes belly up.
Ideally communities should be fully distributed (i.e. not tied to a specific instance) to avoid these issues. Unfortunately, that would lead to its own series of challenges.
New anxiety unlocked:
- Open Mastodon / Lemmy client
- Find it eternally spinning
- Slight panic
First time on Mastodon it turned out to be temporarily, new with vlemmy, I fear for the worst.
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Download your user data. https://lemmy.ca/post/1292268
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in case of emergency, upload your user data on another instance.
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…
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profitanxiety cured
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I’m thinking it might be down for good, all of the donation links go to closed accounts
What a weird way to go out, yesterday the owner was talking about how to proceed in the future and apologized for having to block an instance
I don’t wanna be that kinda person, but it’s possible the owner had some visitation from the local authorities. It’s not uncommon to use a server for multiple things, and I could imagine that there might have been some… not so cool things on there
Well, they only defedded from REDACTED the day before so pretty likely. Hopefully they’re just doing due diligence.
Here’s the post: https://lemmy.world/post/1148656
Yeah I read through that post last night. My guess is they got spooked about being potentially liable for anything cached that they may have federated with and just pulled the plug.
The only reason I dont think that is the case is because the donation links are down. I still dont know what happened, I wish someone knew his mastodon or any other social media.
No? Wouldn’t the donation links being down further add credence to this theory?
I thought you were talking about the idea he was cleaning the servers from such content, but now I see you were actually saying he completely pulled the plug.
So yes, that is a posibility, but not giving any sort of heads up its closing or anything is just weird even if that were the case, this would not constitute a larger admission than what he already did since he already had said he was defederating from an instance to avoid that kind of content. And to my knowledge, as long as they are moderating this stuff social media and the like dont put the owner in trouble, otherwise every ceo of twitter or facebook would have gone to prison a long time ago.
Oh I’m not saying anything specifically. Purely speculation on my part. I just think it wouldn’t be surprising to be completely spooked away even if not actually charged with anything.
Yep, more likely intentional than just a technical issue with the website.
Another user here that had set up VLemmy as primary instance. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to back up subscriptions and how to do due diligence on an instance to make sure that it is more credible/stable?
I have relaunched on Lemm.ee, and want to make sure that I am prepared for this happening again!
In addition to the other suggestions, I have just published lemmy2opml which allows you to export your subscribed communities to an OPML file. You can then import that file to a different account.
See the comment here by @CMahaff@lemmy.world for an unofficial tool they made.
Looks like that only works if the instance is still online…
That’s correct. It’s unfortunate but at least next time you can be prepared. I’m hoping this functionality becomes an official part of the software soon.
And I can imagine it will be a functionality of one of the apps some time.
Sync Ultra had a cloud backup option, although just for its settings. I can imagine something like that with the profile things, handled on app level. That would be very cool.
Just sign up on small instances to distribute the load they said… 🙃
I do hope they take back their domain name before someone parks it.
Not even that small of an instance relatively speaking
Just run your own instance, I say… that way it’s your fault when you forget to renew the domain name instead of the poor soul running vlemmy.
The domain whois showed it was renewed for years. That’s not the hard part about running an instance, not by a longshot.
I am very aware of what it takes to run a small instance, you are indeed correct that domain registration is not the hardest part.
What is the hardest part? Aside from funding if it’s a personal one. I have a domain I’m barely using and I can think of a funny lemmy url but I think it’s still probably more time and work than I’ll get out of it at the moment
Honestly it depends on what your experience level with running software is and what you want out of it. For me things have been rather smooth sailing as I already host a number of things for myself (so know all about domains, DNS, servers, reverse proxies, docker, etc.) and I am the only one actively using my instance right now so (local or admin-level) moderation isn’t really an issue either.
You lose me at docker. Maybe when I have more time I’ll research it more.
Docker isn’t super necessary, there are some scripts out there that hide a good bit of how it works like the official ansible playbook or lemmy-easy-deploy.
I use docker to easily run many pieces of software in isolation from each other, it’s like VMs if you’re familiar with those, but different in some key ways that don’t really matter for this discussion.
this was rather a big instance no?
Indeed, I think number 15 if I remember correctly. I hope that it’s ok, it’s my home instance and is where I was posting the majority of my account content.
Welp, that sucks, but on the bright side, you can always find a home in the vast fediverse.
Dude, this sucks. I signed up for a couple of instances, but that was my main one.
So if it’s gone and unable to come back are all those comments and posts we made there just gone?
The data for the communities is stored on that server, so yes, but only for the content that was actually posted there. Any posts you made from that account will continue to exist on outside communities.
Hopefully, it’s just a temporary failure.
I just wish I could access my account settings, which look like they are stored on the server instead of the app I use. I had already blocked several hundred communities that I wasn’t interested in and I don’t look forward to re-blocking them again (ok, maybe I look forward to it just a little bit, I might have a problem)
If vlemmy comes back up you can use this tool I made to pull down a list of subscriptions, blocks, etc. and if you want, copy all those to a new account:
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Obviously your comments, etc. are gone, but at least you can keep browsing uninterrupted from another instance.
Awesome. I will have to check that out and make backups if that server pops back up. Thanks.
I assume once all these apps get fully fleshed out functionality like this will be added and automated into client software to make it easier. Backing up/load bearing would probably be something that could be federated among instances of different servers too to prevent things like this from having much of an effect on users, no?
The devs have definitely said there will be an official way to backup your account and import into another at some point, but I don’t think they’ve decided what exactly what would be like. Lots of possibilities with varying degrees of difficulty.
Yeah, it’s all a bit janky right now, but that’s kinda part of the charm. I like watching things grow and evolve.
How did you even find that many? Did you know connect for lemmy let’s you block entire instances in app?
I used Memmy and just went through /c/all and hit block on anything I wasn’t interested in or was in a language I can’t read. I also used the search function to search for things that I know I’m not interested in “shitpost”, “anime”, “circlejerk” etc and blocked everything that came up in the results.
I didn’t know about Connect letting you block entire instances. I saw a post on how to do that manually, but I haven’t tried that yet. Might be good to block some foreign language content if an instance is gonna serve up nothing but stuff I can’t read.
Connect also has filters. I’ve also found a script for migrating subscriptions which won’t help here but maybe next time for safety you could back it up to an alt that way?
Does memmy have content filters? Maybe suggest it to the devs.
I’m in the same boat. I’ve set up shop at lemm.ee just in case but I still like VLemmy and hope that it comes back online.
I was moderating my small community on vlemmy, and have posted several markdown-heavy things I would like to back up in case I were to move instances. Gladly, that was possible with lemmy.world cache (for everything but pics).
Store your markdown in a git repository. Link it up to VS Code, install a few markdown extensions to make writing easier and more consistent.
You’re a markdown wizard Harry!
Bummer, had a second account I set up recently there.
aa
Porkbun LLC is a DNS registrar, so maybe somebody didn’t pay their bill?
Well, not being owned by a profit-driven evil stab-us-in-the-back company going IPO has advantages and disadvantages :-(
How bad could the bill have been? Was there any prior mention of server costs/donations before this?
I don’t think it is a payment issue. At least in Brazil (where I live), a registration (which can be done directly with the .br registrar, not necessarily third parties) costs less than 10 USD a year.
vlemmy.net was registered less than 2 months ago, for 5 years. I suppose (hope) it was already paid for 5 years.
it’s strange that it’s parked at a dynamic dns service though
aa
I know I’ve forgotten to turn on auto-renew on a domain before. It sucks and caused a lapse. I think most registrars have a cooldown period where you can pay a fee to get your domain back before they release it back into the general pool. It’s usually like 90 days or something.
How odd. Could it be an account hack? Server malfunction?
Really weird.
dynu.com is a dynamic dns service. I don’t think the maintainer of vlemmy.net would be running the instance from a dhcp (variable) IP, to justify using dynamic dns.
Or is it usual for people to run instances from their homes using common ISP subscriber variable IP addresses?
Even more strange that it was registered just last month, according to whois. Is vlemmy.net that new?
Aren’t many of these instances a product of the reddit migration? I don’t expect the one I’m on to be much older.
Or is it usual for people to run instances from their homes using common ISP subscriber variable IP addresses?
No. That that would be absolutely ridiculous for anything beyond an ephemeral CounterStrike server.
The server isn’t malfunctioning. Rather, the name
vlemmy.netisn’t given you the IP address of the server anymore. Does anyone have the IP? We could test if the server is still there.Could be a dns server malfunctioning (or rather misconfiguration).
After all, “it’s always DNS”
“It’s not DNS. There’s no way it’s DNS. It was DNS.” My favorite haiku ever
I checked historical data for the A record and came up with this, no clue if this is the original server address
Ran a ping on it and it timed out so I am guessing u/pyarra just pointed the dns to the park page while they figure out what’s going on with this server
Welp… That was where I created the main account I was using.
i was going to wait a day or two to see if it came back but it looks like it’s still down, made this alt on feddit like 2 minutes ago hoping for vlemmy to come back lol
dammit now im gonna have to resubscribe to like 50 communties
Doesn’t look good as the domain goes to a parked page.
It seems dynu.com is a dynamic dns service. Was vlemmy.net running from a variable IP (dhcp) address? Is that usual for lemmy instances?
When I was still making personal websites ~10 years ago there were quite a few hobbyists who were providing free hosting on relatively big servers and I do remember they had dynamic IP addresses as they had the servers running in their homes and it was a bit painful to setup a domain name back then and you needed a dynamic DNS provider. So probably the fact that it’s redirecting to a dynu.com page is a good sign.
This looks probable?
Yes that confirms that it’s hosted in his home, which means likely a dynamic IP address and explains why the domain name is pointing to dynu.com. I think the good news here is that he still has the domain name, it’s just his server that is probably down.
Damn that was the first instance that I signed up for.
I signed up for it just a few days ago (reddit refugee), it was working until earlier today.
I’ve just signed up at feddit.nl now, to be able to post this.
