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.
How did you even find that many? Did you know connect for lemmy let’s you block entire instances in app?
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.
Weren’t you on pyarra’s admin team? I remember the person with the same nickname as yours being in charge of !support@vlemmy.net and !chat@vlemmy.net
If so, it sucks even other admins haven’t been notified about what’s happening.
I was not on the Admin team, I did moderate the Chat community and I was active in Support but I wasn’t technically an admin. I had applied to be an admin, as pyarra the day before yesterday put out a post asking for admin applications, but then the server died and I’m not sure what happened.
i think the archive from that instance is gone, anything posted on other instances should be still there i think but anything posted locally is probably gone unless its still in the memory on other federated instances
I imagine this is just a dns/domain name issue and the server still exists with all its login info and data intact. If that’s the case we should just be able to change the settings in whatever client we’re using to the new domain name/ip address and everything should work like normal. Unless the server got nuked and there were no backups or something catastrophic.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Well I’m not losing lem.monster because I’m not a fucking idiot.
I wonder if something else happened
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.
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
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.
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.