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.
I’m not very tech savvy, but I’m a mod of some fairly large communities hosted on feddit.uk. Can someone ELI5 what, if anything, I need to do to keep my communities up? !badrealestate@feddit.uk is the one I’m most keen to keep going.
Unfortunately there isn't much you can do if the server goes down. I'd suggest setting up the communities on another instance and try to get people to migrate to the new one, like what !android@lemdro.id did.
I'm in almost the same boat, head admin just went and disappeared a few months ago, all the update are done with other admin that has technical knowledge on these sort of thing, and i'm here just to manage the site but without access to the server. Now the people who manage the server started to lose interest and communication is quite hard, and i'm left without access to the server and the only admin that is still active. When the time come i think i'm gonna went your route as well.
I feel like I gently warned about this during the process, relying on an inactive admin always seemed like a bad idea. I hoped it was taken care of and that somebody else was assigned console access but no assurance was provided, no explanation as to what the actual situation was, so I left here for another instance. Turns out my fears were true and I'm glad I didn't waste any more time here.
I have no idea why folk were so eager for Tom to turn back up again, why that was a source of any delay, or any reason to change plans for "Quackhouse" once they were in advanced stages.
I feel like all this has really crushed what was a promising UK community on Lemmy, a double-blow now, and I hope any new instance that appears is well and truly distanced from this one.
I agree. Basically all Quackhouse plans were cancelled because Tom sent a single email and didn't show up again. We did have Quackhouse up on a limited extent and were starting to roll it out a few days ago, but they pulled Quackhouse offline again so I cannot work on it. I was hoping to have communities migrated before or around the new year, even if we didn't set up sign-ups by then
I am not ignoring the money and labour that goes into managing an instance. I just wish there was an institutional way of it not having to be dependant solely on single/select few individual(s).
Just beacuse the alternative way is hard and not feasible (yet) does not mean you should turn a blind eye to the flaws of current state of things.