Do they get adopted by other instances? Are they still accessible from other instances? Can you still post on them from another instance?

Edit: From my understanding every instance that deals with a community has a cached copy. Will that copy disappear after a certain time, because it can’t phone to home anymore?

  • Koordinator O@lemmy.worldEnglish
    92·
    1 year ago

    Lemmy is instanced. if the host “dies” everthing else dies with it. even the accounts and everything. as far as i understand it. maybe there will be a few cached posts from that instance but im not sure about that.

    • ashok36@lemmy.worldEnglish
      92·
      1 year ago

      This is going to make it impossible for any technical help communities to take root. The fact that the whole thing can just go poof completely turns me off from using something like that.

        • UnhappyCamper@kbin.social
          31·
          1 year ago

          I understand what you’re saying, but I feel more concerned with the stability of instances due to the fact that they’re run by everyday people as something to do, they already have lives and jobs outside of this. Maybe it’s a passion project they pour a lot into, but the possibility of it crashing down for various reasons is a lot higher than a larger centralized service run by companies whose soul purpose is to run that service.

            • Kichae@kbin.social
              4·
              1 year ago

              This.

              If we don’t want things run so as to squeeze every ounce of value out of users, then things can’t be run by profit-seeking entities. They basically need to be run by altruistic people doing it for pro-social reasons, or we stay on the enshitification train.

              If people are really invested in a community remaining a forever space on the internet, we just need to develop the features for migrating those communities to new instances, and then having that community shell out for their own host.

              That is where stability will come from. Communities self-hosting.

            • UnhappyCamper@kbin.social
              1·
              1 year ago

              Gyfycat has also been running for 8 years, Imgur for 14. I’m talking only about the longevity of a service running. I don’t think people are expecting any instance to run for that amount of time, though its obviously too early to tell.

              Clearly these large centralized services eventually decay away due to power hungry individuals within, but it takes some time.

              I’m not sure if people are going to read this as I’m pro-centralized services, because I’m not, I’m just making statements.

      • AnonymousLlama@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        From memory posts are partially archived by Google’s cache, so if they’re indexed correctly people should still be able to search for something and have it as a result? Unsure if that would work if the whole domain is actually gone though

      • Rhaedas@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        I get the concern, but long term persistence is probably a rarity. The internet is still young. If anything a federated group of communities that are linked somehow will last far longer than a single server of even a large corporation. For the weeks that Lemmy et al have been growing, how to best develop communities that connect and last has been an ongoing question.

          • Rhaedas@kbin.social
            1·
            1 year ago

            The internet as most people know it and as companies depend on it isn’t that old.

            The difference being discussed here is a single existence vs. potential for redundancy. The best way for something to outlive even the places it’s stored is by repetition. That goes against both how we’ve grown things so far on the internet as well as the talk about competition among instances and the biggest one wins. It’s far better for there to be many groups that share information in some way but are their own entities and aren’t dependent on the rest.

    • r00ty@kbin.life
      3·
      1 year ago

      Not quite. Other instances subscribed to remote instances are sent the information about new posts, comments etc and they store them locally on that instance. So, while there’s not be new content (since the main instance is the controller for all incoming content and distributes it back out, it would break the connection for new stuff.

      There are manual steps an instance admin could take, to take it over. Probably it would need some agreement as to who takes it on.