What Happened to lemmy.fmhy.ml? What Happens if an Instance Disappears?

I was originally signed up on lemmy.fmhy.ml, but about a day ago the site went out or something. Now I can’t log in to my original account.

Is there a way for me to at least retrieve my subscribed community list?

  • Bizzle@lemmy.moorefam.net
    391·
    1 year ago

    I think that handling federation by domain name is, in a word, whack.

    It should be verified by GPG keys instead and be domain/IP agnostic.

  • Riyria@sopuli.xyz
    25·
    1 year ago

    Holy shit, so does that mean if Mali is reclaiming .ml that lemmy.ml is going to go down? That will really hurt Lemmy as a whole for content purposes but also user loss and retention. A good chunk of the users onLemmy.ml may not come back.

    • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      It would have hurt early on, but no so much now. They locked the instance down, quit accepting new users, and banned users being able to create communities themselves stating that the goal of the instance was to be a carefully curated one and they considered it “complete” and no new communities would be created.

      They’re not even in the top 15 instances by users anymore.

      The biggest impact would be that Lemmy.ml is the developers instance but I imagine they have backups of everything and would just register on a different domain and transfer everything and everyone.

      • Riyria@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        1 year ago

        Damn I didn’t know that. I have a lemmy.ml account but I abandoned it early on for other instances and have finally settled where I’m at now.

  • Saki@monero.townEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    What Happens if an Instance Disappears?

    I may be wrong, but one potential problem in such a case might be that (not you’d totally lose your data but on the contrary) you won’t be able to delete your posts etc. even if you want to delete them, since its copy is “mirrored” by many other instances. Not sure though.

    • lohrun@fediverse.booEnglish
      15·
      1 year ago

      Never put anything on the internet you don’t want out there forever, even if you were able to delete your comments from your instance and the federated instances there are most certainly people from /r/datahoarders making archives of posts and comments in the fediverse

    • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.comEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Heck, I haven’t been able to get a comment deleted in ALL instances so far. Instances that don’t directly federate with my instance doesn’t seem to process deletion reliably.

      Interestingly, edits seem to propagate more reliably. So if you want to make sure your comment deleted, just edit it to replace the content before actually deleting them.

  • TheWoozy@dmv.social
    61·
    1 year ago

    That’s where I signed up too. I’m going to give them a few more days before I give up on them.

    I’d also like to know how to export my community subscriptions.

        • deafboy@lemmy.world
          4·
          1 year ago

          Both lemmy.fmhy.ml and lemmy.ml are still up. It’s just the DNS record that’s gone.

          You can point those domains to the correct IP by editing your hosts file.

          • On windows it’s located in C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
          • On mac, in /private/etc/hosts
          • On linux, in /etc/hosts

          Add the following to the bottom:

          188.114.96.12 lemmy.fmhy.ml
54.36.178.108 lemmy.ml

          This is a temporary workaround. The federation is probably screwed anyway, so there’s no point in posting any new content there, but it’s good enough to back up your subscriptions or posts.

    • venusenvy47@lemm.ee
      7·
      1 year ago

      If you are comfortable with using command line stuff, I found this little Python script perfect for my needs. I copied my subscriptions from my original instance to two others:

      https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate

      I don’t know enough programming to know whether the tool could be stealing my authentication, but my passwords are random and I don’t really care if anything happens to those.

      Edit: You have to run this when the servers are actually functioning. I was migrating my stuff away from my lemmy.world account because of the overloading there, and the server was pretty slow while it was copying my subscriptions. I ran it again an hour later and it picked up the few subscriptions it missed on the first pass. It’s smart enough to check if the new server has a particular community subscription already in place.

    • Dalë@feddit.uk
      1·
      1 year ago

      Me too. I’ve now migrated to feddit.uk , I was lucky that I had locally cached pages for my subscriptions so I was able to replicate them, all be it manually, but at least i now have a new instance with all my subs.

  • Lojcs@lemm.ee
    4·
    1 year ago

    They could probably just move the instance to the new domain name.

    • 0x4E4F@lemmy.rollenspiel.monster
      6·
      1 year ago

      It should be the last resort plan. Cuz if the domain name changes, that’s a new instance as far as Lemmy is concerned. Sure, the instance will hold all your posts and media, but I don’t think new posts made from that account will be associated with posts before the domain name change.

      • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        Lemmy.ml is the instance ran by the developers of the Lemmy software. I’m sure they would just love to some sort of key verification for federation than just domain name, which they should be doing anyway because domain names can change.