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?
- Take the instance down (no more incoming activities)
- 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)
- Set up a static site to serve all that JSON.
- Take the media on pict-rs and move to some long-term back up system.
- (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.
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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.
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.
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?
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…
Lemmy still does not provide an easy way to migrate accounts
It does, doesn’t it? What do you mean?
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.
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.
