Sometime early this morning, our database started having issues, most likely due to a disk corruption issue.
Unfortunately the postgres database was unrecoverable, and we had to restore from a nightly backup, so a few hours of posts and comments will be missing.
Apologies again for the downtime, and for the disruption.
How does lemmy federation work in this case? Conceivably after being restored from backup the lemmy.ml instance could see those few hours of lost history as federated to other lemmy instances and resync it back as the host instance. Obv I'm vastly oversimplifiying things but what happens today?
It strikes me that there is the potential to use trusted remote servers as a means of recovering the lost data. I mean, nearly every lemmy instance except lemmy.ml will have copies of the missing data, and given the hugely redundant availability of that data (including the ability to compare from multiple sources to establish/verify trust), using that data to rebuild missing content seems like it could be useful functionality.
That doesnt work because we generally cant trust remote servers. Plus we dont even know where to fetch from, so wed have to run a complete crawl of all known instances which isnt practical.
When I saw LemmyMl was down I went to sleep and had a dream where I was eating extremely large fries that that were labeled on the fryholder "Sadistically Large" (chicken fries as well as potato fries) and drinking probiotic shakes so dangerous they literally had to be bundled with a free antibiotic shake by law which of course I took one sip of in front of the clerk to calm them down before guzzling the other shake down with impunity. Woke up before I found find out what the burger was. Maybe those anti-woke types are on to something.
This was, without any doubt, a prophetic dream. The apocalypse will soon be upon us! Be wary of the four horsemen: Ronald, King, Wendy, and... Chihuahua
I saw the "502 Gateway" HTTP error message, but I never even closed my browser tab. I refreshed again today and Lemmy.ml was back online! Thanks for your hard work!