• KᑌᔕᕼIᗩ@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • hitmyspot@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • LemmyLefty@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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…

    • KairuByte@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • infamousbelgian@waste-of.space
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • KᑌᔕᕼIᗩ@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Stijn@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    New anxiety unlocked:

    1. Open Mastodon / Lemmy client
    2. Find it eternally spinning
    3. Slight panic

    First time on Mastodon it turned out to be temporarily, new with vlemmy, I fear for the worst.

    • elkaki@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      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

      • iso@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        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

      • Lobster2142@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • elkaki@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          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.

            • elkaki@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • can@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year 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.

  • Youthless@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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!

    • bba@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • can@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • TheGreenGolem@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            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.

    • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • can@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        The domain whois showed it was renewed for years. That’s not the hard part about running an instance, not by a longshot.

        • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • can@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            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

            • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li
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              1 year ago

              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.

                • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

    • TheSaneWriter@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • jsveiga@feddit.nlOP
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      1 year ago

      I did, on feddit.nl, to be able to post this :)

      Then I realized the feddit.nl domain was registered less than 2 months ago.

      Luckily I don’t care about upvote balance (if I did, I’d probably have stayed in reddit as a karma hostage), so I’ll just keep hopping instances if they stope working.

  • Ilikecheese@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Ilikecheese@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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)

        • CMahaff@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Ilikecheese@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            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?

            • CMahaff@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • Ilikecheese@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Yeah, it’s all a bit janky right now, but that’s kinda part of the charm. I like watching things grow and evolve.

        • can@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          How did you even find that many? Did you know connect for lemmy let’s you block entire instances in app?

          • Ilikecheese@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • can@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              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.

    • TheSaneWriter@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • itsmikeyd@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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!

      • jsveiga@feddit.nlOP
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        1 year ago

        Well, not being owned by a profit-driven evil stab-us-in-the-back company going IPO has advantages and disadvantages :-(

        • can@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          How bad could the bill have been? Was there any prior mention of server costs/donations before this?

          • jsveiga@feddit.nlOP
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            1 year ago

            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

            • CannedTuna@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              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.

      • jsveiga@feddit.nlOP
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        1 year ago

        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?

        • can@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • PorkrollPosadist@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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        1 year ago

        The server isn’t malfunctioning. Rather, the name vlemmy.net isn’t given you the IP address of the server anymore. Does anyone have the IP? We could test if the server is still there.

        • jsveiga@feddit.nlOP
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          1 year ago

          Could be a dns server malfunctioning (or rather misconfiguration).

          After all, “it’s always DNS”

        • Lobster_2142@feddit.nl
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          1 year ago

          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

  • Chickerino@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    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

      • AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • jsveiga@feddit.nlOP
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      1 year ago

      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.