As far as I’m aware, if the instance vanishes your account is toast.
The posts and comments that you have written remain replicated on whatever instances picked them up.
You no longer have any control over them, though.
Well it’s good to know that not everything will be lost.
BRB, creating an account on every instance I can find.
That’s the case when an instance just straight up shuts down, right?
But if a user deletes their comment this also gets propagated to other instances. Do instance admins have a nuke button to initiate a delete for all content?
I am curious when an instance completely shuts down if comments fade over time to deleted or stay archived and what dictates comments staying or disappearing.
When I looked in my inbox of all replies I saw a vlemmy comment, which showed deleted. I had replied to it too, but that getting deleted made my response not be publicly visible. Only searched it out because was in a comment in a thread where I asked from anime recommendations and had started watching their recommendation then wondered where the comment had gone.
Without knowing the actual implementation:
I’d wager comments are preserved and don’t get cleaned up over time. Because if content gets deleted the instance has to federate the deletion to other instances to clean everything up (like an event system). If the instance just vanishes there would be no deletion request happening.
If deletion was automatic when an instance goes down we’d have already lost thousands of comments due to the outages lately :)
Is there vlemmy comments and communities still viewable on other instances? I wonder if that vlemmy user had deleted the comment then before the instance itself went down.
Removed by mod
Just FYI, you can sync up subscriptions far easier using tools like LASIM
Ugh THANK YOU. I’ve been looking for this for a couple days after seeing a link out of the corner of my eye and not saving it on the spot. It wasn’t showing up anywhere with my search terms…I knew I wasn’t imagining it…
Consider the common analogy of e-mail: your e-mail account is defined by its address, because that’s the key piece of info required to do things with that account, like send e-mail from it, or to it. If you change the name of the server that your e-mail account belongs to (E.G. @mymail.com to @mymail2.com) that, by definition, is a different account. Lemmy user accounts work effectively the same way.
Of course, with e-mail, it’s not terribly difficult to just take the history of all your e-mails from the old server, and move them, but those e-mails are all still gonna show as “from” or “to” the old address, unless you also go through and re-write the history. Lemmy currently does not have any such “migration” procedure, and also suffers from a variety of design constraints that would make this much more difficult than our theoretical e-mail history migration, most notably the problem of how to synchronizd this mgration action across all instances.
This issue has actually already come up in practice, BTW. The instance VLemmy basically vanished off the internet a month or so ago, apparently due to loss of their domain name rights, right in the middle of the reddit migration. There were a lot of people asking whether the whole INSTANCE could be migrated to a new domain name. If that wasn’t enough push to get migration capabilities designed and added, I doubt anything will.
The same happened with terefere.eu, it still pings but the web access is shut down. That’s it for me about the idea of using a small local server to relieve the big ones
Take regular backups of your subscriptions, saved comments and posts and blocked communities and users
How would one go about it?
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Iirc, it doesn’t include saved posts/comments yet (correct me if I’m wrong) as well as your original account’s post/comment history.
Is LASIM able to do this? I don’t know where it stores the database file.
It stores it as a JSON in the same directory as the executable.
Yes. It downloads a json file. For me, it went straight to my desktop.
lol, I didn’t check on desktop, probably is there haha.
But I didn’t know it saved saved posts and comments.
You lose it and never hear from it again. Happened to me, had to open another account in another instance because of that, it’s a shame but I guess that’s the risk until we get something that is some kind of Backup->Restore->Move account or something.
I don’t see why accounts should be valuable enough to be worried about.
When I was on reddit, I would start a new account every 2-3 years.
Everybody’s different. Personally I was proud of my 15-year-old account on reddit (until they banned me for reporting too many ads as spam). People tend to trust your opinion more when you have an established account.
Having an old account makes it less likely that you’re shilling for a company when you recommend a product, for example.
I was staring at your comment for quite a long time to understand what the Austrian money has to do with recommendations, but at least I learned a new word, thanks!
I have an alt for my main account. I just link back to my main account from there. I mainly use it when my main instance goes down. Likewise, I link my main account to an older account I had originally that I migrated from (all same username). That way, even if my new/alt looks really new, if someone cared enough, they could follow the trail backward to other older accounts.
People tend to trust your opinion more when you have an established account.
Huh, interesting. The only time I looked up someone’s post history is I couldn’t tell if they were a troll or serious.
You need to transfer it before it vanishes.
