this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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What to do when communities die? (self.announcements)
submitted 1 year ago by jgrim to c/announcements
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Hello,

There is a unique problem of the fediverse. When an instance goes offline, its communities will never sync again.

Recently, vlemmy.com shutdown. Quite a few communities synced with discuss.online and other instances. Because vlemmy.com is not longer brokering communication, these communities will never be in sync again.

We have a several options:

  1. Leave them there. Do nothing.
  2. Leave them there but make a post that it's dead and hope people see it.
  3. Purge the communities. Act like they never existed.
  4. Build some elaborate system to work around vlemmy being gone. This would take a lot of work and collaboration with other instances.

Let me know what makes the most sense to you as users. Are any of you still using vlemmy communities? What about long-term planning? Maybe this isn't an issue now but what if lemmy.world vanished?

Please, let me know what you think. I'm torn on this one.

Thanks, Jason

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[–] sarsaparilyptus 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My initial thought was to build an archive server that grabs all the federated instances' content via the public APIs. Then each instance would then have the option to purge after. However, this prevents folks from discovering it.

It would ideally still be indexed by web crawlers, so the content of defunct sites could still be shared.

[–] jgrim 2 points 1 year ago

That’s true. That could be useful. I could do that somewhat simply too.