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
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?
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.
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).
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??
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.
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)