How do i discover federated Lemmy posts (from a dead/offline instance) location/addresses?

2 months ago by street689 to c/lemmy

I have many links from a permanently offline/down instance of Lemmy (closure announcement #1 , #2 ) like:

https://lemmings.world/post/10000001

https://lemmings.world/post/10000002

so how do i convert these links so it links to a federated (backup) content on other Lemmy instance/s?

Is my only chance to try https://web.archive.org/... to find out post content/name, so i can use search engine to search that post name if it indexes federated version of the original post?

If i know the post name, do i have better way to find the federated content address beside using internet search engine?

It seems like Lemmy sucks (still too centralized), possibly similarly to https://spasm.network/apps (i am yet to try its federated forums).

sjmarf 6 points 2 months ago

so how do i convert these links so it links to a federated (backup) content on other Lemmy instance/s?

Paste the link in the search bar of another instance. If the post is cached, it'll return it. Ideally, use the link to the post on the original instance, rather than the link to the post on another instance.

Technical answer:

Instances store posts from other instances. Every post on the fediverse has a unique ID called the "actor ID". The actor ID of a post is the URL of the post on the instance of the user that authored the post. On the Lemmy web UI, you can retrieve this by right-clicking on the rainbow star icon below any post and copying the link.

To retrieve the details for a cached post, you can call resolve_object?q=<actor-id>. For example:

https://sh.itjust.works/...

For convenience, the Lemmy UI calls this when you paste a URL in the search bar.

This can work for any URL that points to the post, but you should use the actor ID where possible. The Lemmy backend knows the actor ID of every post it has, but it may not know whichever URL you're querying with, and you may get a null result when the post is cached.

I hope this helps.

path: 0 25222269, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0
Shadow 3 points 2 months ago path: 0 25222203, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 2
street689 1 point 2 months ago

I have tried 12 instances with most posts according to https://lemmyverse.net/?order=posts . I am able to find most post on 1-3 largest instances (those listed on the top of that page).

Is there any meta-search across many or all Lemmy instances? So i do not have to waste time opening many instances manually and doing search for each of the missing posts on each?

After updating the link and this link will become offline in the future, can i repeat the process or it wont work, because federated post can not be federated again (2nd level)?

path: 0 25222203 25233730, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1
Shadow 1 point 2 months ago

Not that I've ever seen, that would kinda be a waste of resources of the lemmy servers.

Federation is only one "level". The origin sends it to all the other instances, they don't relay it along.

path: 0 25222203 25233730 25236648, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
lemmy
lemmy

@lemmy.ml

login for more options
14708
1352
63

Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

go to feed...