Feddit.UK has finally kicked the bucket- and what happens next.
Feddit.UK has finally kicked the bucket- and what happens next.
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.
~20CX12
Sucks to see the flagship British instance go, but at the same time, I like the idea of all the Reddit references being confined to the past.
I agree. A big objection was if we became big, reddit might be able to sue us.
The whole aim of this new instance is actually trying to see if we can attract some people to come onto it without having to really know what lemmy is. Feddit.uk sounded like a reddit knockoff, and having to explain it sounded confusing. If we could spread the word about the new instance without having to mention federation, as to not be intimidating, people may see the content provided from federation and be happy anyway, and not question the inner workings until they are settled.
Has enough time passed for a Friendster reference to be ok?
Not a very interesting site:
Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.
We can’t connect to the server at fedster.uk.
"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." - Feddit.UK
Wow. If this isn’t a perfect example of the possible problems with federated networks I don’t know what is.
I’m still for it of course. But it has to be done right and this is far from that.
Twitter could go permanently offline tomorrow as well, for all we know.
It is looking increasingly likely that at some point it will just collapse.
it is possible now to copy your data to another account on another instance.
in the future lemmy might even support something like having your account automatically backed up to another instance. Similar to a backup email address at your main email address.
Profile backup would be so cool! I'm super for it.
Big problem with lemmy in particular is that communities are server based and so if you lose the server you lose the whole community.
On mastodon, if I talk to person 1@a.com and person 2@b.com and a.com goes down, I can still talk to person 2@b.com. on lemmy, I might be talking to both in community@c.com and if that server goes down I'm no longer in a community with person 1 or person 2 despite a.com and b.com both being up.
I have a hard time thinking how it would work. For example your comment posted at https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/5907612 posted at "Sunday, December 24th, 2023 at 8:40:09 AM GMT+00:00". If you back up and restore to a new account in 6 months, does your new account get to retroactively repost this comment to December 2023? What about top posts you make?
Individual emails make sense as lone documents but on social media the individual items are only comprehensible in context.
If you just want a record of your individual posts/comments without context you can point an RSS reader at the feed available on your home instance user page. (Lemmy users only; for some reason this feature not available to kbin.)
It's not a problem with federated platforms, it's a problem with any new platform.
Anything that's been around for less than a year is not too likely to stick around for a year.
Something that's been around for 10 years is likely to stick around for another year.
Time will filter out the instances that stick and the ones that don't. Users will go to the older instances because those are the ones they can trust to still be up for the foreseeable future.
I think it shows some of the strengths of federated networks. If the owners of a small proprietary social network ghosted their project, it would take a huge effort to try to replace it, which would be insurmountable for many communities. But in this case, a community can fork onto a new server pretty quickly and seamlessly.
Hard disagree. This is a problem every web service has had to deal with since the beginning of the web: what happens when a host (either the machine or the person) stops working? How do you keep the service up?
Centralized services solve that problem with internally funded, transparent redundancy. Federation solves the problem with externally funded, highly-visible redundancy. They're still the same solution, just a different way of going about it.
You could argue that user identity is lost due to the discontinuity between instances, but that's probably something the Lemmy devs could fix without too much hassle.
It was basically an aeroplane flying with dead pilots before then
aren't we all
Shows once again that federation is useful since other servers are running and you could post that message.
On the other hand, sucks if you had your main account on that server because now you start from scratch. I am not even talking about your lost posts and comments, more about community subscriptions. Quite annoying to get that all in place again. I used to have an account on the fmhy.ml instance, it was not fun...
If you leave it too long, folks will just register for another instance, and all momentum will be gone.
I wouldn't take too long getting the rescue boat out when folk are in the ocean....
Yes, it literally happened with FMHY's Lemmy instance. Lost access to the original domain, started again from scratch on a different domain, but their users didn't come back and already moved in to other instances.
Unfortunately we had planned on getting the boat out before that happened. But it happened anyway. For now the instance seems to be back up, but this was a wake-up call.
My thoughts exactly; from a moderator standpoint it just doesn’t make sense to wait for another UK dedicated instance to open at an unspecified point in the future. It’s too much of an unknown quantity. If I need to move/copy the communities I moderate while I can still access them on feddit, I’m moving them now and to an established, decent sized instance - it’s my best chance of not having to do this again in the future.
As a fellow UK instance owner - gimme a shout if you need a hand with the setup!
Instance name if you're taking residents?!
UK bloke with main/only account on Reddthat. Oh the irony!
Lemmy.cafe
It should show up as part of my profile as well.
I'm happy to take residents, although I've not been limiting it to UK as feddit.uk had sort of taken that at the time.
As I mentioned in another discussion, the fediverse needs to work like crypto mining pools, you join the pool of servers that share the data load, but you're just there for data redundancy, users don't "sign up to your server", they "sign up to the website" that all servers are hosting together, if you go offline another server has your data so the website never goes down in the end.
I believe the idea behind different servers not meshing but federating, so they can have different focuses and different moderation stances.
But then you're still stuck with some kind of central authority, just let people decide what they want to block from their feed instead of relying on an admin to do part of the job for them.
Right now my admin could decide to defederate from a bunch of instances and there's nothing I could do about it except create a new account elsewhere. Same if they accidently die, all my data will be lost when the server is shut down.
Have a single website with decentralized servers and triple redundancy based on server location? You're pretty much bullet proof and it becomes much more interesting for small players that don't want to get too involved... Just give whatever space you've got available to the cause and let the software do its thing.
This seems like a much better way, in many ways it would be more robust. There would be problems though... This would be even more vulnerable to EEE. Disputes/hostile action between servers could damage the whole website (I'm talking about maliciously hosting CSAM for example).
Yeah, unless I own all my own data, the Fediverse doesn't really solve anything. Sure, I could host a server just for me, but if everyone did that would it even work? Or would it collapse under the load of all the data whizzing about behind the scenes?
Or just have a bus factor greater than one.
Somehow it's up
feddit.uk seems to be online.
The UK has fallen billions must now lurk
Feddit.uk is now back up. I just checked as of now.
I wouldn't get too excited just yet.
It came up a few times yesterday and quickly went down again.
Seems to be up at the moment still.
Sounds like it went down at the worst moment (right before the holidays, of course) and the admin wasn't available to bring it back up. If the instance admin is serious about this and wants to keep it running, maybe finding some trustworthy users there that would be willing to act as admins would be a good contingency plan to ensure it doesn't stay down for long.
I will warn you, it does have a silly name, but that was the name that was decided upon.
Damn, I was almost going to suggest some stuff. (chippym.uk - chippy, UK, a rodent...)
Serious now. I'm glad that federation means that people aren't putting all their eggs into the same basket; sure, feddit.uk going MIA is a loss, but just imagine if it was a non-federated platform. Hopefully the old users will be able to build their new home in the new instance.
Thanks for the update and for the work in building the new instance!
I'll be keeping my eyes open for further news.
What happens to the accounts and communities that were on feddit.uk? I made an account there to create !hellointernet@feddit.uk, but I spend most of my time on sh.itjust.works. Are there any tools to move existing content from the old site to the new site in a (somewhat) cohesive manner, or are we starting over from scratch?
I assume no-one, including the feddit uk admins, can access the server to copy anything off it, so it will all be lost.
Isn't one of the benefits of federation that content is backed up in multiple places?
For example, I can still view all the content at https://sh.itjust.works/c/hellointernet@feddit.uk, despite not being able to access https://feddit/c/hellointernet.
The Hello Internet community was tiny and not very active, so it's no big deal to start over from scratch, but it might be worth looking into for some of the larger communities which had compiled large quantities of information.
Start it again on our new instance :)
Any indication of when that might be open? I understand you don’t want to be flooded by too many sign ups at once but you’re not giving any concrete information at all. Wouldn’t it make sense to at least invite the mods of the larger communities currently hosted on feddit.uk to join yours now so they can more easily move their communities over?
Sorry for the delayed reply, I've been a bit out of the loop. It seems like feddit.uk is back up now, and has stabilized a bit? Am I fine to keep !hellointernet@feddit.uk where it is?
Good luck and good work!
Will there be contingency to stop this from happing with other instances?
Will there be contingency to stop this from happing with other instances?
That depends how each instance is set up, just like any other website.
There are community efforts like building a culture of moderators reaching out to each other
We're making a contingency for the new instance
That's not how the fediverse works.
With the way federation currently works, it's impossible, sorry. It's one of the pitfalls of a decentralized system without consolidated ownership: any of the nodes could fail at any time and the responsibility of bringing it back up is the sole job of that node owner.
I'm on kbin but liked a couple of the feddit.uk magazines, so it's a shame to see them go.. Will keep an eye out for updates, best of luck!
I will warn you, it does have a silly name
Why though? A catchy and memorable name, I understand, but why silly? Who wants to say to people they belong to the 'quackhouse' instance, or whatever?
Good luck guys!
yikes. hope this gets sorted out soon
We still calling displaced Internet users "refugees"? Seems a little disrespectful to actual refugees with real issues.
Displaced would be a better word.
I'm on kbin.social but subscribe to unitedkingdom on Feddit - look like it is workinhg OK at the moment
The joys of federation.
If you're logged in on kbin, looking at a community on feddit while feddit is down, then in all likelihood, kbin simply holds the most recent copy of feddit, and it's only showing you what it already has.
This is kind of the root of federation. Different, but the same.
I did actually click through to the original community to
Seems to be up now. But I get your concerns, having an instance with an inactive head admin and redundance of sysadmins isn't great. Best of luck for your new instance!
And here I was wondering where it went...