Asklemmy @lemmy.ml _cnt0 @unilem.org 1 yr. ago

Does anybody know what happened to lemmy.villa-straylight.social?

It was my home to my account. I didn't catch any announcement it would be going down. 2 weeks ago the website started throwing errors (50* internal server errors) and since a week it is completely unreachable. There are still DNS records resolving the domain, but the site seems completely gone.

32 comments

I have no idea. That's why i disagree with people saying you better join a small instance. Since the reddit api changes i saw like 15 instances dying. Instances like lemmy.world have a lot of problem but the admins have proved that they could handle them
- saw like 15 instances dying
  
  Looking at the Nodes chart on The Federation it appears we've lost almost 200 instances in the last month. It's easy to imagine a lone admin running out of time, money, or interest, or simply not wanting CSAM troll posts federated to their server.
  
  I wonder how many of those were single user instances. I've seen a lot of people on here running their own instance just to host their own account and no communities.
- Plus: Selfhosted instance is pretty hard to setup and maintain and also causes a metric shit-ton of traffic and data storage.
  
  The single hardest part of running a self hosted instance is the initial setup. There's very little maintenance involved if you set it up right. Storage and bandwidth are going to be directly related to what you sub to. If it's all images and videos sure. I'm sitting at about 14GB storage right now and my bw is pretty modest.
  
  I can certainly see people getting bored with it and abandoning their servers tho. But I doubt it's the upkeep.
  
  Edit: 14 GB not 25.
- I'm of two minds here. You can't get new instances if no-one joins and uses them when they pop up.
  
  Personally, I've gone with sopuli, which is quite small, but it only takes on new users through application, and has been around for years. An instance can be small, but also have a pedigree.
- Yeah I've been against promoting smaller instances from the very beginning for this very reason.
  
  If it's small and has been established for years? Go for it. If it's small and just popped up recently? It's a pretty big risk.
  
  I like the idea of a federated network of lots of smallish instances. You're absolutely right, though, that some flux is to be expected, and evident.
- We're trying ❤️ Also we're growing our infra team as needed. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask or DM me 😎
For the foreseeable future with Lemmy, plan on the unplanned.

Create accounts on several instances, and keep them synced.

I use lemmy-account-sync. It works perfectly for me.

There's another project, lemmy_handshake, which is an Android app (YMMV, I haven't tried it.)

It's not too difficult to use Oracle's free tier and Lemmy-Easy-Deploy if you want to register a domain and set up your own single-user instance. I do that, knowing that it could poof at any time. I run lemmy-account-sync as a cron job nightly on the same Oracle instance, but hosting your own instance isn't required for syncing.

I sync my main account with accounts on a few small instances. I chose them from the list of Lemmy nodes which are on the current version of Lemmy, that have active users. Small instances tend not to defederate other instances so much, if that is important to you. They are also less likely to be targets of DDOS attacks. They can also wink out of existence without warning, which may be the case with lemmy.villa-straylight.social.

I also sync my main account with accounts on a few of the larger instances. (I mainly use Lemmy Explorer to find Communities, but big instances are best if you just want to doom scroll "All.")

Should I tire of self-hosting, or if Oracle decides to randomly delete my instance (a real risk), then I'll just log into another instance.

You'll lose some stuff (like post history, and private messages) but it will be better than losing everything again.
- I can vouch for lemmy handshake. Work well with my two accounts.
- Thanks for the pointers. I'll have to look at that sometime.
No idea, but it's a strange coincidence, that the name of the admin matches the one of feddit.de. Good luck in your searches for a new home!
- If you're referring to wintermute, that's the name of an AI from a Gibson novel. Soo, pretty common among cyber punk nerds online. My name is an allusion to one character from that series, too: count zero.
  
  Ha, TIL! Thank you!
What happens to your content and comments in a situation like this?
- The text portion of your comments and posts lives on everywhere where it was federated. All images uploaded to the instance are gone.
I'm curious about this too. I wish I knew if the admin had some other account (like on mastodon or something) just so he could tell us whether it's coming back or not.
- Well, the administrative account went by "wintermute". Good luck finding a wintermute online that's actually them.
  
  @wintermute@feddit.de Are you the admin of lemmy.villa-straylight.social?
- I think maybe a lesson to be taken here is to be wary of servers that don't have alternate modes of communications.
Does anyone know what happened to the Noworriesto.day instance? There was no warning AFAIK, just poof, gone.

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