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

  • @Myrhial
    3•11 months ago

    Is it possible for discuss.online to have a reference list somewhere of dead/offline communities? If someone tries to like a post on them, or comments on them, could the user receive a warning that this won’t be sent through? Ideally, could there be some indicator on each post + the main page of the community that this community is on a dead instance? Always nicer to have that before someone spends an hour crafting a really good reply not knowing it won’t be going anywhere.

    • jgrim of SublinksOPMA
      1•11 months ago

      I’m somewhat limited by core Lemmy functionality and the time available to extend it. However, I have an open wiki page, https://wiki.discuss.online, where I could create a list. I can build tools that report these communities and post them there.