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Instance freezing as an alternative to full shut down

a year ago by Raphael to c/meta

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This is my current understanding of the situation:

  • The admins are no longer interested in running the instance, due to increasing demand, missing moderation features and waves of abuse from external actors.
  • Transferring the instance to someone else is a complicated issue. Even though there is not a large amount of private information in Lemmy's database, you can not simply transfer the trust the users placed in the original admin to the new owner.
  • Lemmy still does not provide an easy way to migrate accounts

Given all the above, shutting down the instance seems to be the natural course of action. I'd like to propose an alternative: freeze the instance activity and keep it in some form of "read-only" mode until Lemmy matures.

What would that require?

  1. Take the instance down (no more incoming activities)
  2. Run a script that generates static json files for every actor (user, community), federated object (post, comment, report) and activity (like/dislike votes, announce activities, etc)
  3. Set up a static site to serve all that JSON.
  4. Take the media on pict-rs and move to some long-term back up system.
  5. (Optional, but could be helpful in the future) allow users to checkout the private keys of their own user and community actors.

This won't help solve the current problems and it wouldn't help with the users who now will have to move away to a new instance, but it could eventually help for users who want to restore the activity on a new server.

I've been experimenting with an implementation for Decentralized Identifiers for ActivityPub that can make it possible for people to move servers but maintain their identity (similar to bluesky's PLC directory), so perhaps we could have a future where users can fully migrate their accounts from server to server without requiring intervention from admins.

noodlejetski 29 points a year ago

so... pay for hosting a website for an unspecified amount of time, until an unspecified goal ("Lemmy matures") is reached, just in case the admins, who have stated that they've (justifiably) lost interest in managing the instance, suddenly change their mind, and don't mind having to catch up first with whatever the current version of Lemmy will be at that point, with who-knows-what breaking changes introduced?

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rglullis 2 points a year ago

Not necessarily "Lemmy matures". It could also be:

  • ActivityPub software starts supporting DID to allow migration of identities.
  • ACtivityPub adopts some ideas from nostr and turns the server into a simple message relay.

Which then could let the lemm.ee admins to bring back the server - or offer a way for users to checkout their actor keys, etc, etc...

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null_dot 10 points a year ago

There are projects that will just scrape the whole site. Some of these are used as a build step in producing static sites even.

A static version wouldn't work with any clients of any kind of course. It would be browser-based with the default or whatever frontend you scraped it with.

I'm not necessarily opposed to this idea. However... and I understand that this opinion is not widely held among lemmy users... IMO the best approach is to just embrace the transience of the fediverse - that's it's strength. Instances are easy come easy go. Have multiple accounts on multiple instances and change them according to your mood.

When instance admins choose to move on, they're not letting us down or whatever. They've completed their part of the mission and handing over to someone else.

I don't know what communities there are on lemm.ee which are about to be discontinued. There might be some that want to keep their content available, but maybe that's better managed on a community level.

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lily33 2 points a year ago

The issue is that currently we don't have the technical features needed for such an attitude: namely, transfering the communities. Decentralised IDs would also help.

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Blaze 1 point a year ago

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lily33 1 point a year ago

I'd say it doesn't count unless it also moves all followers, which this doesn't.

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Blaze 4 points a year ago

It would if all the users were on Piefed instances. I instantly got 100 subscribers on that community as they were Piefed users.

Piefed also has a "subscribers" tab in the mod panel, so you can reach out to subscribers about a move.

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Penguincoder 1 point a year ago

ActivityPub does not have that feature or ability. Other federation type software does. But being as Lemmy is built with ActivityPub for federation, it can't offer instance independent identities.

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Irelephant 2 points a year ago

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veniasilente 1 point a year ago

Not just transferring communities, but also posting history (much of what makes a user's identity).

I'm starting to think that the best way to use Lemmy for posterity is actually the same way as using Reddit for posterity (assuming you'd want to do that): rather than submit your comments directly there, post them in your own blog or smth and just make your lemmy/reddit comments links to your home-comments.

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null_dot 3 points a year ago

Do people really make comments with that level of gravity though?

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null_dot 1 point a year ago

Yeah, again... unpopular opinion but just embrace the transience. How necessary is "transferring" a community. There's very few communities with content that provides some kind of reference.

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southsamurai 2 points a year ago

Exactly.

If you're making posts or comments that you want preserved, you should be backing them up anyway.

It would be nice if the export function copied saved items as well as subs and blocks though.

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mosiacmango 2 points a year ago

It does copy saved items.

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anzo 6 points a year ago

Why not use archive.org tools to have a full snapshot? It's fulfill a similar purpose.

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katze 3 points a year ago

Lemmy still does not provide an easy way to migrate accounts

It does, doesn't it? What do you mean?

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lily33 6 points a year ago

It provides an easy way to transfer your subscriptions to a new account, but that's not exactly the same. For example, your posting history will be lost.

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ech 4 points a year ago

All of those comments and posts will remain on instances they have federated to. Transferring posting history would necessitate resubmitting every single post you've ever made, needlessly and messily duplicating one user's presence across the fediverse. And in the case of a closing instance, that bulk is multiplied several hundred or thousand times over. Not a reasonable request by any stretch.

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calavera 3 points a year ago

Exacly, losing your post history is not nice

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Blaze 1 point a year ago

If you keep your username and avatar, people will still recognize you, I do that regularly every few months, so on the "persona" aspect people should be fine.

About the "archive" aspect, the content is still there, not sure how often people have to go back to their past posting history. Saving past important comments and posts from an old account is still an option.

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veniasilente 0 points a year ago

If you keep your username and avatar,

No such guarantees. Usernames are not "copyrighted" across instances for very good reasons, and there is no cross verification of origin other than what you voluntarily provide on your own profile sig.

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Blaze 1 point a year ago

When I open an alt, admins usually check out with me to see if it's actually me.

Usernames are not “copyrighted” across instances for very good reasons

Try to open a "dessalines" or "jordanlund" account elsewhere, you're probably going to get questioned about it.

other than what you voluntarily provide on your own profile sig.

Yes, that's a way to link your accounts.

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ryedaft 2 points a year ago

You would still have to pay the hosting fees.

But yes, a way to migrate users like you can on Mastodon would be cool.

And a clean implementation of shutting down instances would be great. If you are overwhelmed with life and want to quit then it should be as easy as possible - it would benefit the ecosystem by increasing trust.

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rglullis 1 point a year ago

Hosting a static website is virtually free. All that static JSON is going to amount to a few gigabytes of data, you can compress to save up to an order of magnitude. I can bet you that I can store all of lemm.ee's data (and media!) on Storj for less than $20/month.

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