I had an account on lemmy.one and now the instance has been down for a day or two so I made this new account. I also heard other small instances are dead or disappeared.

So which ones do you think will actually stick around for a long time?

ALSO, does anyone know how to get my subscriptions from lemmy.one and import it here? TIA!

  • kglitch
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    6311 months ago

    Instances with

    more than one admin
    clear policies and active moderation
    engaged user base
    regular backups
    no porn

    …will stand a better chance than most.

    • Polar
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      2811 months ago

      No porn? Why?

      .ca allows porn. You actually have to click “show NSFW” during sign up if you want to see it, so it’s not on by default, and it’s very easy to turn on/off if you want it.

      I find that the instances that ban porn also ban a lot of other stuff that isn’t bad. Feels like I’m in church and everything is being censored.

      • kglitch
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        1911 months ago

        Surely keeping the csam out means someone on every nsfw instance needs to look at a whooole lotta porn, including sick stuff they really really don’t want to see. For no pay. I can’t see a way for that to last long so either an instance bans porn or stops moderating and gets defederated.

        • @Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          611 months ago

          Sure, but isn’t that something all of the instances will have to deal with, whether they allow nsfw content or not, I bet people will try to post it. And the trolls/sabouteurs will go for the sick shit.

          • kglitch
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            711 months ago

            Yeah, true, although it’ll be a lot worse for the mods on nsfw instances where they need to make a judgement call about what crossed which line or not. That’s 10x more difficult than just deleting everything that gets reported enough times.

        • @Gamey@lemmy.world
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          111 months ago

          I could see a better chance with one of the experienced porn Admins from Reddit, they have years of experience and are probably used to even worse shit!

    • gabe [he/him]
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      1611 months ago

      I’m hopeful that the well moderated nsfw instances stick around so no 4chan-esque instances have a chance to replace them and metastasize past mass defederation

  • @Anafroj@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    Not to sound too pessimistic, but we live in a time where we see Twitter collapsing, despite being one of those “too big to fail” websites. My bet is that none will stand the test of time, the web is ephemeral (and archive.org is an underappreciated wonder of the world). I would rather say that what you really need is a backup routine.

    • SoNick
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      1911 months ago

      On one hand, a Sonic hacking forum I’ve been a part of since before its current forum software has been running the same database since 2003, on the other hand I fully acknowledge that it’s the exception and not the rule.

        • @Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1511 months ago

          Because they crave more growth rather than prioritizing stability and being true to what they’re purpose of existence is. These social media forum try to be everything and that is their downfall. Being focused on what you were built for and being damn good at it is the real key to a platform’s long life.

      • @Anafroj@sh.itjust.works
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        1011 months ago

        Yes indeed, giving proper notice seems like minimal etiquette. Then again, life happens. Admin may be caught in some tragedy making maintaining their lemmy instance not exactly a priority, or they may even be dead.

        There is not much you can do to just migrate your account somewhere else, that’s a limitation of federation (compared to fully decentralized protocols, like Secure Scuttlebutt), but I’d wish Lemmy would implement ActivityPub’s following endpoint, so we can easily build scripts to backup the communities we’re in.

  • Cyber Yuki
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    2411 months ago

    Don’t think this is a strange phenomenon or that it’s permanent. I’ve seen Mastodon (and Pleroma and Misskey etc) instances get born and die regularly. This is because it’s easy to set up an instance but it’s also easy to fall in an economic problem or just give up.

    Not everyone is ready to set up their own instance; it requires dedication and resources.

    • Amju Wolf
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      2411 months ago

      The fediverse really needs some kind of universal login and a way to easily migrate accounts between instances.

      • @Blackmist@feddit.uk
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        711 months ago

        Not so much migrate as be able to use it from anywhere and have it replicated. Same with communities.

        Give things a unique ID, and access it from anywhere, even if the original server goes away.

        This kind of thing may not be possible with current ActivityPub protocols, but there’s always room for improvement.

      • @Gamey@lemmy.world
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        311 months ago

        The universal login is a very old suggestion but it’srealluy hard to pull off because that would have to be build into the core of the protocol. About the migration, that’s a Lemmy issue, not a general Fediverse one

        • Amju Wolf
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          511 months ago

          Not really; login mechanisms are a separate thing. OAuth already exists. You only need Fediverse software to accept OAuth from anywhere and to provide it to others.

          The migration part is IMO harder, but not necessarily by much. I don’t know of any fediverse software that’d allow it though.

          • @Gamey@lemmy.world
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            211 months ago

            What I mean with “universal login” is one account for multiple Fediverse services, I guess that wasn’t clear from my post. Yea, proper migration is hard and questionable if we should even allow it (could cause all kinds of issues, espwcially regarding account security) but Mastodon allows you to move your followers and add a redirect which is the most important part of the account and Lemmy should probably try to do something similar with ranks and communities.

  • million
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    2311 months ago

    Out of the loop, what happened to Lemmy.one?

      • paraphrand
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        311 months ago

        People love to talk about porn. But do they pay for it in a context where it’s expected to be free?

  • hitagi (ani.social)
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    1711 months ago

    I plan to keep running this instance for a long time. As long as there are weebs here on Lemmy, I will give them a home lol

    Btw, I also had a lemmy.one account. It was my first Lemmy account too. Hope they get back up and running.

    • @spiderman@ani.social
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      11 months ago

      how is it on finance side btw? is hosting this instance is bearable or is it burning a hole in your pocket?

      also i noticed that our instance has 100% uptime. great work on that!

        • Magnor
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          11 months ago

          Used this one, works very well.

        • @StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.astaluk.icu
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          411 months ago

          If you don’t have an experience using the command line then it’s a tad more involved then I can explain in-depth on mobile. Best I can do is give a brief outline.

          To start with, wescode/lemmy_migrate is a python 3 script. If you are running windows install WSL (Ubuntu), once you have a command line I am familiar with you will want to download the repository from GitHub to a directory.

          You will then need to create a config file called migrate.conf Use the sample provided in the repo under configuration. Edit it to use your information. You can use nano as a text editor.

          Then it looks like the command would be something like:

          python lemmy_migrate -c ./migrate.conf

          Sorry if that is crap help, but I’m not near my computer right now, and don’t often use Windows anymore to boot.

          PS:

          WSL is a program from Microsoft that gives you a mostly functional Linux command line within Windows. None of this is as complicated as it sounds, I’m using more words then strictly necessary to explain things somewhat at beginner level. The most time consuming part of this would be first installing WSL and then installing Ubuntu onto WSL. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do so.

          Hopefully someone more familiar with Windows can tell you how to do the same thing from either the DOS prompt or from Windows PowerShell. It’s doable, (almost anything is) I’m just not familiar enough with either to walk you through it.

            • @StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.astaluk.icu
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              111 months ago

              Just search for tutorials based on the key words from my post and you’ll get there.

              I am sorry for the RTFM post though. Been a rough day and haven’t been able to get near a computer to do a better write up for you.

        • @lemming934@lemmy.sdf.org
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          111 months ago

          Here’s a thread where I helped someone else with the process on windows: https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/1420339

          The steps are:

          1. Set up the python code
            1. Go to https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate/releases/tag/v1.1.0
            2. Download the zip file
            3. Extract the zip file, to make a folder somewhere on your system called lemmy_migrate-1.1.0. Remember where this folder is
            4. Inside the folder you will find a file called config.ini. Use notepad to edit the file to have your server URL and login credentials.
          2. Set up the python interpreter
            1. Install python from https://www.python.org/downloads/
            2. Open powershell
            3. install the python package requests by pasting the following command into powershell: py -m pip install --user requests
          3. Use the python interpreter to interpret your python
            1. first make sure powershell is looking at the correct folder. One way to do this is to open the lemmy_migrate-1.1.0 folder in windows explorer. right click on the box that shows you the path, and copy the text. then write cd in powershell. This path will very likely be something like C:\\Users\Wu9fee\Downloads\lemmy_migrate-1.1.0. If you don’t want to copy and paste the path from explorer, you can just do cd Downloads then cd lemmy_migrate-1.1.0
            2. Finaly, you can run the python command with py lemmy-migrate.py -c config.ini

          Let me know if you run into any problems.

          If you can pull this off, you can officially say you know how to code.

    • @kowcop@aussie.zone
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      711 months ago

      Seems like this would be a great feature for the myriad of Lemmy mobile apps… nightly backups of your Lemmy account settings and a button to recreate it on a new instance

    • @1984
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      11 months ago

      I mean it’s not that hard. When joining a new instance, go to communities and click subscribe on the ones you want. Takes a few minutes.

      Sure, if you have subscriptions to communities that nobody has subscribed to, you need to search for it. But it’s also easy I think.

      I think it takes longer finding and using a tool for this than doing it manually :)

  • Nato Boram
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    11 months ago

    ALSO, does anyone know how to get my subscriptions from lemmy.one and import it here? TIA!

    The other instance has to be up. If it’s permanently down, there’s nothing I can do.

    1. Login to https://natoboram.github.io/Leanish/lemmy.one/login
    2. Export your user in https://natoboram.github.io/Leanish/lemmy.one/settings
    3. Login to https://natoboram.github.io/Leanish/lemmy.ca/login
    4. Import your old user in https://natoboram.github.io/Leanish/lemmy.ca/settings
    5. Click on the big button

    It will search for the subscribed communities, attempt to retrieve them and attempt to subscribe. Refresh the page between tries. Do not share your exported user; it contains your email.

    Leanish is very much alpha and doesn’t have all features. There’s tons of missing features, many of them listed in the GitHub issues.

  • Philip
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    1311 months ago

    I have hosted a lot of my own services for a couple of years and plan to continue hosting my instance(endlesstalk.org) indefinitely, unless something very major happens.

    As others have mentioned I think multiple admins and backups(hard to verify though) are a good sign, but its only indications and you can’t really be sure, if a instance will be there forever. I think there needs to be an easy way to migrate accounts and then the instances going down hopefully gives a notice, so you can move your account.

    Gonna be difficult to recover accounts from instance going down without a notice I think. You could regularly take a backup of your account, but that is tedious and you will still lose some data.

    • paraphrand
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      111 months ago

      Can you upload your comment history to a new instance? Does that question even make sense? I’m not sure what backing up means, I guess. Just an archive?

      • Philip
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        411 months ago

        There are tools that can backup and migrate communities, blocks and settings like lasim for a user. So you can migrate between instances.

        As far as I know, there aren’t any tools that can migrate comment history and I think anything that could do that, would need to be backed into lemmy itself(Which it isn’t currently).

  • The Bard in Green
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    11 months ago

    I’m running my own instance, JUST so I can be in control of my own Lemmy experience (and in control of my own archive of my Lemmy activity). I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.

    Yes, my instance was down for three days last week. I had trouble with an update and didn’t have time to troubleshoot it. But I wanted my Lemmy so I DID get around to it and got it working again. And yeah… I never did get email working properly so when my ONE friend who’s not me joined my instance I had to command line into the database and approve him manually. But so what?

    And yeah, eventually the internet ecosystem may shift again, or I might get hit by a bus or who knows?

    But if you WANT to join a tiny instance that’s 99.999% (bus factor) not going anywhere for a while, I’d probably let you join mine.

      • @Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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        411 months ago

        Not the person you ask, but as I’m in the same boat (finally got everything running except email lol), I use a scrap dell PC with a 8gen hexacore, 512GB SSD, 4TB HD & 8GB RAM on a 1Gb/~700Mb line 🤷 I’m aiming at an artsy/comics drawings server (hence some initial space) and I think I’ll open it up for inscriptions when I have figured out the OVH mail config…

        But it’s a big step, today if it crams it’s just impacting me.

        Cheers!

        • @Gamey@lemmy.world
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          111 months ago

          I don’t host my own instance but that sounds immensly overpowered for the job! Lemmy doesn’t even host images and pure text, a database and web interface shouldn’t be that hard to host

  • @gelberhut@lemdro.id
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    1011 months ago

    People often compare fediverse with email. But it is email as it was in 90x, not as it is now. Ant it was not that great that time, tbh.

    Ideally, you need to select an instance which is already quite solid has enough users, has several admins and clear financing and which is not the most busy instance because we want decentralisation.

    This is really an issue for kemmy as well as matrix - recommendations how to select a server contradict each other 🤔

    • @eleitl@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Email in the 1990s and email in 2020s is the same if you’re running your own MTA.

      • @gelberhut@lemdro.id
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        311 months ago

        Sure. If you do everything yourself, like implement antispam, backup, maintenance, high availability, etc - then it is mostly the same.

        • @eleitl@lemmy.world
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          311 months ago

          HA for personal MTA is way overkill, just run a second instance with higher MX record value. Antispam is a given, backups are snapshots, maintenance is just system updates. Of course, you could just run an appliance which does it all for you. I’d say it’s way easier than in 1990s.

          • @gelberhut@lemdro.id
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            311 months ago

            my original comment was about using e-mail service provided by others. Hosting own e-mail server as well as a lemmy instance is … not for “normal” people (as well as serving their cars or build a house etc)

            • @eleitl@lemmy.world
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              111 months ago

              Happily, I’m abnormal that way. I also dabble in PV DIY. Building houses from scratch, no. Servicing a modern car is also not worth it. Sadly, no open source EVs yet available.