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
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.
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.
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 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.
It’s possible to backup your data, but you have to do it beforehand. There’s no chance to save your data once the server goes down.
Would it be difficult for apps to do it automatically? Just have a constant backup hosted on your phone or cloud account?
What data do you want backed up though ?
That is something that should be possible: Choosing a backup sync server that have my data(profile). I hope they implement that
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.)
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 [email protected] and person [email protected] and a.com goes down, I can still talk to person [email protected]. on lemmy, I might be talking to both in [email protected] 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.
Profile backup would be so cool! I’m super for it.
All the instances that popped up during the reddit exodus were not that thought through. Once the feddiverse stabelize around sustainable communities it’ll work better
What do you mean by “not that thought through”?
Somehow a lot of instance admins didn’t really thought through how much work this is and for how long. It takes a lot of time and effort to actually do this right. They underestimated what it takes to run even a medium-sized instance in the long run.
I expect there are instances running on old laptops in someone’s basement. Once the novelty wears off they will get forgotten by admins and die. Power costs, admin overhead, will put some off continuing to host as time goes on. But it’s like a hydra, more will pop up and life continues on. I’m lucky that I work in IT and have equipment hosted at the DC for little cost, so self hosting my Lemmy access is cool in a geeky kind of way.
Twitter could go permanently offline tomorrow as well, for all we know.
I sure hope it does, nobody needs that cesspool.
It is looking increasingly likely that at some point it will just collapse.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
deleted by creator
feddit.uk isn’t really down, they just left the federation.
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.
You up and running yet?
Not yet, the ones higher than me are… Sorting something out.
We’re currently doing various things behind the scenes - this is definitely something we’ll look into when we can (might be another day or so).
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!
The UK has fallen billions must now lurk
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!
And here I was wondering where it went…
What happens to the accounts and communities that were on feddit.uk? I made an account there to create [email protected], 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?
Start it again on our new instance :)
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 [email protected] where it is?
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?
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/[email protected], 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.
You can see the content but not, afaik, move the community or take ownership of it. I’m afraid you’ll have to recreate it somewhere more stable.
I wonder what happens if somebody recycles a domain that was previously used for another instance… I feel like everything is going to break.
Federation will break.
Maybe servers need a contingency plan to be able to communicate with users as to backup options in case one goes down?
I guess I’m kind of asking / supposing, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if lemmy / activitypub doesn’t really work that way.
As in, posts to feddit.uk are stored on feddit.uk. If you read a thread from sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected] then sh.itjust.works server will pull it down from feddit.uk and show you the post. It may even cache a copy of the post to show it to another user, but that’s not the same as backing up the post.
yikes. hope this gets sorted out soon
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
Somehow it’s up
We still calling displaced Internet users “refugees”? Seems a little disrespectful to actual refugees with real issues.
I’m sure actual refugees have more to worry about than whether you’re offended on their behalf, mate
I am certain actual refugees want to be taken seriously rather than have their collective noun watered down by upset internet users.
I’m sure you think you’re making the world better, but I promise you, you’re not. You’re just trying to make it more about you, and it’s insufferable
Couldn’t give a fuck about me tbh
Imagine, if you will, being so boring that you have to pick fights about how people word things.
Listen, he said “refugees” and maybe that wasn’t the right word. But you know what? Both you and I both understood what they meant by that.
The point of language… any language is to portray ideas between different people. In that context, OP did a fantastic job of that. we understood. Job done.
Instead of providing any discussion of any value or merit, and apparently having the personality of wet cardboard, you chose to critique his word choice on how to describe those displaced by the issue.
Nobody was confused. Nobody is going to conflate the struggles of actual refugees with the inconvenience of feddit being unavailable. There’s no confusion here. Fighting to reclaim the word “refugee” when nobody gives any shits about it (except you apparently), is certainly not going to win you any awards. I promise that refugees care less about what they’re called, or who appropriates the term for inappropriate uses, and they care more about migrating to a country where they will be safe from harm.
Nobody is standing up and being proud of their refugee status, demanding that we treat their term with more respect… I know refugees, and I would think that all of them would have preferred to not have been forced to become one. Nobody chooses to be a refugee, you do it because you’re scared for your life. Scared of your neighbors, government, and national authorities. Nobody wants that.
I know that refugees are proud of the fact that they now live in a place that’s not like the place that they left, but I have yet to meet one that’s proud that they had to flee.
I’m pretty sure they couldn’t possibly give less of a shit about someone misusing the term “refugee”.
Lost me at the first line, I’m not even reading that.
I’m sorry but this is a really offensive comment for dyslexics. Don’t you know how lucky you are to be able to read?!? Oh my god so angry I’m shaking rn
👆 You
The irony is that a dyslexic person shouldn’t be offended at someone else’s ability to read.
Yet refugees like me, my parents, friends and family have a right to be offended about the misuse of the word refugee.
Ah yes, pretending to be offended on behalf of a minority to gain attention, then when called out on it, pretending to be the minority themselves to gain favour
Your “refugee” parents simply didn’t give you enough attention when you were a kid, huh? 🤣
This comment made me smile, thanks!
Displaced would be a better word.
Good luck and good work!
Feddit.uk is now back up. I just checked as of now.
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 wouldn’t get too excited just yet.
It came up a few times yesterday and quickly went down again.
