Has vlemmy.net lost its domain name?

New anxiety unlocked:
Open Mastodon / Lemmy client
Find it eternally spinning
Slight panic
First time on Mastodon it turned out to be temporarily, new with vlemmy, I fear for the worst.
- Download your user data. https://lemmy.ca/post/1292268
  in case of emergency, upload your user data on another instance.
  ...
  ~~profit~~ anxiety cured

This is one of many reasons I tell people not to become overly attached to their Lemmy accounts. You don't know what or who's hosting your instance and it could just abruptly disappear overnight.
- The problem with hosting your own instance is that you can't create a community in another one.
  And since they are a central aspect of Lemmy, your experience can still suffer if the instance with one of your favorite communities goes belly up.
  Ideally communities should be fully distributed (i.e. not tied to a specific instance) to avoid these issues. Unfortunately, that would lead to its own series of challenges.
- It will be good when there is an easy way to back up and restore your subs, your blocks and possibly even your comments. If you wish to change instances, it should be easy.
  
  This would be great. I get the value of having instances be separated but starting over is a real pain.
  Maybe something about account creation: create the account only for this instance or create it for all/select number of instances? Even something like 5-10 instances “holding onto” your account could prevent things from disappearing without warning unless something really bad went down.
  Spitballing here, since my understanding of how this works is ehhhhhhhhh…
- Honestly this is part of the reason I’ve been thinking of spinning up my own instance. Literally just so I have control of the instance my account belongs to.
  
  That is why I did it! Not only for, let’s say, a service that stops, but also for the case where an Admin would decide to go in a direction I don’t want to go.

i was going to wait a day or two to see if it came back but it looks like it's still down, made this alt on feddit like 2 minutes ago hoping for vlemmy to come back lol
dammit now im gonna have to resubscribe to like 50 communties

https://www.whois.com/whois/vlemmy.net
- Porkbun LLC is a DNS registrar, so maybe somebody didn't pay their bill?
  
  Well, not being owned by a profit-driven evil stab-us-in-the-back company going IPO has advantages and disadvantages :-(
- How odd. Could it be an account hack? Server malfunction?
  
  Really weird.
  dynu.com is a dynamic dns service. I don't think the maintainer of vlemmy.net would be running the instance from a dhcp (variable) IP, to justify using dynamic dns.
  Or is it usual for people to run instances from their homes using common ISP subscriber variable IP addresses?
  Even more strange that it was registered just last month, according to whois. Is vlemmy.net that new?

this was rather a big instance no?

Just sign up on small instances to distribute the load they said... 🙃
I do hope they take back their domain name before someone parks it.
- Not even that small of an instance relatively speaking

Another user here that had set up VLemmy as primary instance. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to back up subscriptions and how to do due diligence on an instance to make sure that it is more credible/stable?
I have relaunched on Lemm.ee, and want to make sure that I am prepared for this happening again!
- In addition to the other suggestions, I have just published lemmy2opml which allows you to export your subscribed communities to an OPML file. You can then import that file to a different account.

I'm thinking it might be down for good, all of the donation links go to closed accounts
https://liberapay.com/vlemmy
https://buy.stripe.com/8wM9BI4Vj1vh0GkbIJ
https://buy.stripe.com/5kA3dk4Vja1N60E000
- What a weird way to go out, yesterday the owner was talking about how to proceed in the future and apologized for having to block an instance
  
  Yeah I read through that post last night. My guess is they got spooked about being potentially liable for anything cached that they may have federated with and just pulled the plug.

I was moderating my small community on vlemmy, and have posted several markdown-heavy things I would like to back up in case I were to move instances. Gladly, that was possible with lemmy.world cache (for everything but pics).
https://lemmy.world/u/(user)@vlemmy.net
https://lemmy.world/c/(community)@vlemmy.net
- Store your markdown in a git repository. Link it up to VS Code, install a few markdown extensions to make writing easier and more consistent.
  You're a markdown wizard Harry!

This is my main instance. Been solid for weeks since I signed up. I’m using my first from .one now. Not sure where to go for Q&A. Is there a Discord, Mastodon, Gangnam Style’s comment section on YouTube I can goto??
- I can't find anything. Closest I found was a closed donation link. and this
  Is it possible he's just understandably purging the filth from the server within his home?
  
  Thank you for posting this, this gives the most insight into the situation I've seen yet.
  Seems likely he's either making needed changes to not go to jail, or noping the fuck out.

Dude, this sucks. I signed up for a couple of instances, but that was my main one.
So if it’s gone and unable to come back are all those comments and posts we made there just gone?
- The data for the communities is stored on that server, so yes, but only for the content that was actually posted there. Any posts you made from that account will continue to exist on outside communities.
  Hopefully, it's just a temporary failure.
  
  I just wish I could access my account settings, which look like they are stored on the server instead of the app I use. I had already blocked several hundred communities that I wasn’t interested in and I don’t look forward to re-blocking them again (ok, maybe I look forward to it just a little bit, I might have a problem)