TL;DR, Feddit.UK is down, we’re working on making a fun replacement!
A number of days ago, feddit.uk had kicked the bucket.
The community on there had noticed months ago that the owner was inactive. This was around September (Going off of memory). So they arranged to set up a new community run by the same feddit.uk admins (except the owner, the only one who had host access) which would replace it. However, on the weekend as Quackhouse was going to be launched, the owner responded to an email and made two users admins. Emperor and GreatAlbatross. However, they did not have access to the console, just lemmy adminship. Ever since, the owner has been AWOL. The community were too afraid to go back to setting up Quackhouse incase the owner showed up again.
Unfortunately, that wariness and being afraid led to the worst case scenario happening - Feddit.uk has dropped offline. We believe the instance has reached some form of file size cap. It was basically an aeroplane flying with dead pilots before then. And it appears that aeroplane has crashed.
If you are from the feddit.uk refugee base, please join the new community whenever it is ready. Do not sign up now. We are busy and still setting up and don’t want an influx of new users just yet.
For now, sit tight. I’ll update this post whenever it’s up and running and ready for sign-ups. I am not posting the name for now so we don’t get overrun with sign ups. But we would love to invite you back to our community when it’s set up.
The new community will have it’s own unique identity that doesn’t have to piggyback off of Lemmy and Reddit for it’s name. But it will still aim to be the main UK lemmy instance that feddit.uk was. By all means, it will be a full lemmy instance, still federated, etc. It should be the same experience as feddit.uk. But we actually do have fun plans to create a nice sense of identity with that instance if all goes well! I will warn you, it does have a silly name, but that was the name that was decided upon.
We look forward to having new members. All are welcome, whether or not you were from Feddit.UK or not. We will have the theme be a UK-based lemmy instance.
I’ll try and remember to update this post when we are ready.
~20CX12
Sucks to see the flagship British instance go, but at the same time, I like the idea of all the Reddit references being confined to the past.
I agree. A big objection was if we became big, reddit might be able to sue us.
The whole aim of this new instance is actually trying to see if we can attract some people to come onto it without having to really know what lemmy is. Feddit.uk sounded like a reddit knockoff, and having to explain it sounded confusing. If we could spread the word about the new instance without having to mention federation, as to not be intimidating, people may see the content provided from federation and be happy anyway, and not question the inner workings until they are settled.
You up and running yet?
Not yet, the ones higher than me are… Sorting something out.
We’re currently doing various things behind the scenes - this is definitely something we’ll look into when we can (might be another day or so).
Has enough time passed for a Friendster reference to be ok?
Not a very interesting site:
Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.
We can’t connect to the server at fedster.uk.
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“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” - Feddit.UK
It was basically an aeroplane flying with dead pilots before then
aren’t we all
Wow. If this isn’t a perfect example of the possible problems with federated networks I don’t know what is.
I’m still for it of course. But it has to be done right and this is far from that.
Twitter could go permanently offline tomorrow as well, for all we know.
I sure hope it does, nobody needs that cesspool.
It is looking increasingly likely that at some point it will just collapse.
it is possible now to copy your data to another account on another instance.
in the future lemmy might even support something like having your account automatically backed up to another instance. Similar to a backup email address at your main email address.
It’s possible to backup your data, but you have to do it beforehand. There’s no chance to save your data once the server goes down.
What data do you want backed up though ?
That is something that should be possible: Choosing a backup sync server that have my data(profile). I hope they implement that
Would it be difficult for apps to do it automatically? Just have a constant backup hosted on your phone or cloud account?
Profile backup would be so cool! I’m super for it.
Big problem with lemmy in particular is that communities are server based and so if you lose the server you lose the whole community.
On mastodon, if I talk to person 1@a.com and person 2@b.com and a.com goes down, I can still talk to person 2@b.com. on lemmy, I might be talking to both in community@c.com and if that server goes down I’m no longer in a community with person 1 or person 2 despite a.com and b.com both being up.
I have a hard time thinking how it would work. For example your comment posted at https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/5907612 posted at “Sunday, December 24th, 2023 at 8:40:09 AM GMT+00:00”. If you back up and restore to a new account in 6 months, does your new account get to retroactively repost this comment to December 2023? What about top posts you make?
Individual emails make sense as lone documents but on social media the individual items are only comprehensible in context.
If you just want a record of your individual posts/comments without context you can point an RSS reader at the feed available on your home instance user page. (Lemmy users only; for some reason this feature not available to kbin.)
All the instances that popped up during the reddit exodus were not that thought through. Once the feddiverse stabelize around sustainable communities it’ll work better
What do you mean by “not that thought through”?
Somehow a lot of instance admins didn’t really thought through how much work this is and for how long. It takes a lot of time and effort to actually do this right. They underestimated what it takes to run even a medium-sized instance in the long run.
I expect there are instances running on old laptops in someone’s basement. Once the novelty wears off they will get forgotten by admins and die. Power costs, admin overhead, will put some off continuing to host as time goes on. But it’s like a hydra, more will pop up and life continues on. I’m lucky that I work in IT and have equipment hosted at the DC for little cost, so self hosting my Lemmy access is cool in a geeky kind of way.
It’s not a problem with federated platforms, it’s a problem with any new platform.
Anything that’s been around for less than a year is not too likely to stick around for a year.
Something that’s been around for 10 years is likely to stick around for another year.
Time will filter out the instances that stick and the ones that don’t. Users will go to the older instances because those are the ones they can trust to still be up for the foreseeable future.
I think it shows some of the strengths of federated networks. If the owners of a small proprietary social network ghosted their project, it would take a huge effort to try to replace it, which would be insurmountable for many communities. But in this case, a community can fork onto a new server pretty quickly and seamlessly.
Hard disagree. This is a problem every web service has had to deal with since the beginning of the web: what happens when a host (either the machine or the person) stops working? How do you keep the service up?
Centralized services solve that problem with internally funded, transparent redundancy. Federation solves the problem with externally funded, highly-visible redundancy. They’re still the same solution, just a different way of going about it.
You could argue that user identity is lost due to the discontinuity between instances, but that’s probably something the Lemmy devs could fix without too much hassle.
Shows once again that federation is useful since other servers are running and you could post that message.
On the other hand, sucks if you had your main account on that server because now you start from scratch. I am not even talking about your lost posts and comments, more about community subscriptions. Quite annoying to get that all in place again. I used to have an account on the fmhy.ml instance, it was not fun…
The answer, in time, is to have a P2P network of federated clients/servers.
So, Usenet. Coming full circle.
Yeah, but now with more…AI.
If you leave it too long, folks will just register for another instance, and all momentum will be gone.
I wouldn’t take too long getting the rescue boat out when folk are in the ocean…
Yes, it literally happened with FMHY’s Lemmy instance. Lost access to the original domain, started again from scratch on a different domain, but their users didn’t come back and already moved in to other instances.
My thoughts exactly; from a moderator standpoint it just doesn’t make sense to wait for another UK dedicated instance to open at an unspecified point in the future. It’s too much of an unknown quantity. If I need to move/copy the communities I moderate while I can still access them on feddit, I’m moving them now and to an established, decent sized instance - it’s my best chance of not having to do this again in the future.
Unfortunately we had planned on getting the boat out before that happened. But it happened anyway. For now the instance seems to be back up, but this was a wake-up call.
Somehow it’s up
As I mentioned in another discussion, the fediverse needs to work like crypto mining pools, you join the pool of servers that share the data load, but you’re just there for data redundancy, users don’t “sign up to your server”, they “sign up to the website” that all servers are hosting together, if you go offline another server has your data so the website never goes down in the end.
I believe the idea behind different servers not meshing but federating, so they can have different focuses and different moderation stances.
But then you’re still stuck with some kind of central authority, just let people decide what they want to block from their feed instead of relying on an admin to do part of the job for them.
Right now my admin could decide to defederate from a bunch of instances and there’s nothing I could do about it except create a new account elsewhere. Same if they accidently die, all my data will be lost when the server is shut down.
Have a single website with decentralized servers and triple redundancy based on server location? You’re pretty much bullet proof and it becomes much more interesting for small players that don’t want to get too involved… Just give whatever space you’ve got available to the cause and let the software do its thing.
Not stuck. You can set up your own instance and be beholden to no-one other than your country’s law
And you still lost all your previous data and you’re still dependent on one point of failure, it’s just in your own hands now.
It’s also a question of wanting to make the website popular, if you don’t care about getting more people to leave centralized websites then sure the current solution works, if you want more and more users to join then the experience needs to be user friendly and right now it isn’t, even as a tech savvy person I had a hard time figuring out how to add communities from other instances to my subscribed list and I couldn’t figure out why some would never confirm I was subscribed.
Social Media needs to be decentralized behind the scene, users must not feel it.
Sure you lose everything from the dying instance. Everything is temporary. I lost so much karma leaving Reddit, but it’s all nothing, especially here where you can post and comment at any karma
If you’re worried about losing your posts, back up better
You lose the communities you were subscribed to, the block list you build…
This seems like a much better way, in many ways it would be more robust. There would be problems though… This would be even more vulnerable to EEE. Disputes/hostile action between servers could damage the whole website (I’m talking about maliciously hosting CSAM for example).
It’s an issue with the current method too and hosts could decide if they host NSFW content or not with the risk and curation responsibilities that entails if they do (as we can see with Pornhub you can get in trouble for hosting porn stuff that isn’t CSAM).
I doubt that if one server was hosting CSAM that law enforcement is going to be charitable with the rest of the site just because technically it was just one server. I’m admittedly not at all sure of the legal precedent here… But I suspect the site would be judged as a whole, if not by the law then certainly by the public.
It’s already a thing on Lemmy at the moment and it’s not as if people were talking about the various instances as separate websites when they talk about Lemmy.
It would be fairly easy to have a post info page that mentions what servers (including redundancies) the content is hosted on.
Anyway, the ideal solution would be that NSFW content has its own website (LemmXXX! I’m a genius) separate from the rest so as not to potentially create legal issues.
Yeah, unless I own all my own data, the Fediverse doesn’t really solve anything. Sure, I could host a server just for me, but if everyone did that would it even work? Or would it collapse under the load of all the data whizzing about behind the scenes?
Or just have a bus factor greater than one.
feddit.uk seems to be online.
Can confirm
I’m getting this:
Error!
There was an error on the server. Try refreshing your browser. If that doesn’t work, come back at a later time.
Now it seems to be up.
And now error again…
I’m getting basically the same at the moment if I try to go there.
The UK has fallen billions must now lurk
Feddit.uk is now back up. I just checked as of now.
I wouldn’t get too excited just yet.
It came up a few times yesterday and quickly went down again.
Seems to be up at the moment still.
Sounds like it went down at the worst moment (right before the holidays, of course) and the admin wasn’t available to bring it back up. If the instance admin is serious about this and wants to keep it running, maybe finding some trustworthy users there that would be willing to act as admins would be a good contingency plan to ensure it doesn’t stay down for long.
I will warn you, it does have a silly name, but that was the name that was decided upon.
Damn, I was almost going to suggest some stuff. (chippym.uk - chippy, UK, a rodent…)
Serious now. I’m glad that federation means that people aren’t putting all their eggs into the same basket; sure, feddit.uk going MIA is a loss, but just imagine if it was a non-federated platform. Hopefully the old users will be able to build their new home in the new instance.
Thanks for the update and for the work in building the new instance!
I’ll be keeping my eyes open for further news.
Good luck and good work!
What happens to the accounts and communities that were on feddit.uk? I made an account there to create !hellointernet@feddit.uk, but I spend most of my time on sh.itjust.works. Are there any tools to move existing content from the old site to the new site in a (somewhat) cohesive manner, or are we starting over from scratch?
I assume no-one, including the feddit uk admins, can access the server to copy anything off it, so it will all be lost.
Isn’t one of the benefits of federation that content is backed up in multiple places?
For example, I can still view all the content at https://sh.itjust.works/c/hellointernet@feddit.uk, despite not being able to access https://feddit/c/hellointernet.
The Hello Internet community was tiny and not very active, so it’s no big deal to start over from scratch, but it might be worth looking into for some of the larger communities which had compiled large quantities of information.
You can see the content but not, afaik, move the community or take ownership of it. I’m afraid you’ll have to recreate it somewhere more stable.
Maybe servers need a contingency plan to be able to communicate with users as to backup options in case one goes down?
I wonder what happens if somebody recycles a domain that was previously used for another instance… I feel like everything is going to break.
Federation will break.
I guess I’m kind of asking / supposing, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if lemmy / activitypub doesn’t really work that way.
As in, posts to feddit.uk are stored on feddit.uk. If you read a thread from sh.itjust.works/c/whatever@feddit.uk then sh.itjust.works server will pull it down from feddit.uk and show you the post. It may even cache a copy of the post to show it to another user, but that’s not the same as backing up the post.
Start it again on our new instance :)
Any indication of when that might be open? I understand you don’t want to be flooded by too many sign ups at once but you’re not giving any concrete information at all. Wouldn’t it make sense to at least invite the mods of the larger communities currently hosted on feddit.uk to join yours now so they can more easily move their communities over?
Sorry for the delayed reply, I’ve been a bit out of the loop. It seems like feddit.uk is back up now, and has stabilized a bit? Am I fine to keep !hellointernet@feddit.uk where it is?
