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Dude, this sucks. I signed up for a couple of instances, but that was my main one.
So if it’s gone and unable to come back are all those comments and posts we made there just gone?
The data for the communities is stored on that server, so yes, but only for the content that was actually posted there. Any posts you made from that account will continue to exist on outside communities.
Hopefully, it’s just a temporary failure.
I just wish I could access my account settings, which look like they are stored on the server instead of the app I use. I had already blocked several hundred communities that I wasn’t interested in and I don’t look forward to re-blocking them again (ok, maybe I look forward to it just a little bit, I might have a problem)
If vlemmy comes back up you can use this tool I made to pull down a list of subscriptions, blocks, etc. and if you want, copy all those to a new account:
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Obviously your comments, etc. are gone, but at least you can keep browsing uninterrupted from another instance.
Awesome. I will have to check that out and make backups if that server pops back up. Thanks.
I assume once all these apps get fully fleshed out functionality like this will be added and automated into client software to make it easier. Backing up/load bearing would probably be something that could be federated among instances of different servers too to prevent things like this from having much of an effect on users, no?
The devs have definitely said there will be an official way to backup your account and import into another at some point, but I don’t think they’ve decided what exactly what would be like. Lots of possibilities with varying degrees of difficulty.
Yeah, it’s all a bit janky right now, but that’s kinda part of the charm. I like watching things grow and evolve.
Noiceeee, I like the look of this
How did you even find that many? Did you know connect for lemmy let’s you block entire instances in app?
I used Memmy and just went through /c/all and hit block on anything I wasn’t interested in or was in a language I can’t read. I also used the search function to search for things that I know I’m not interested in “shitpost”, “anime”, “circlejerk” etc and blocked everything that came up in the results.
I didn’t know about Connect letting you block entire instances. I saw a post on how to do that manually, but I haven’t tried that yet. Might be good to block some foreign language content if an instance is gonna serve up nothing but stuff I can’t read.
Connect also has filters. I’ve also found a script for migrating subscriptions which won’t help here but maybe next time for safety you could back it up to an alt that way?
Does memmy have content filters? Maybe suggest it to the devs.
Eh, I’m not one to go around suggesting functionality to devs of anything right now. At this point they’re all just scrambling to add basic functionality to what they’ve managed to scrap together. I’m pretty patient, I’ll just wait and see what apps end up with what functionality and which ones are receptive to user input and maybe if I find one that’s 98% of what I am looking for I’ll suggest adding that last 2%. But for now I just used Memmy to block stuff and that’s about it.
I’m in the same boat. I’ve set up shop at lemm.ee just in case but I still like VLemmy and hope that it comes back online.
Weren’t you on pyarra’s admin team? I remember the person with the same nickname as yours being in charge of !support@vlemmy.net and !chat@vlemmy.net
If so, it sucks even other admins haven’t been notified about what’s happening.
I was not on the Admin team, I did moderate the Chat community and I was active in Support but I wasn’t technically an admin. I had applied to be an admin, as pyarra the day before yesterday put out a post asking for admin applications, but then the server died and I’m not sure what happened.
Ah, sorry! Have noticed it a bit after posting my comment, that’s why it’s deleted. Yeah, you were only a mod of !chat@vlemmy.net, but not the support one. And thanks for your participation on vlemmy and your help to newbies like me.
It’s no problem! I really like helping build new communities, and I was having a really good time participating on VLemmy. I’ll continue participating using lemm.ee and continue enjoying the platform and community, but I really hope that VLemmy comes back because I was happy with what we were building there.
i think the archive from that instance is gone, anything posted on other instances should be still there i think but anything posted locally is probably gone unless its still in the memory on other federated instances
I imagine this is just a dns/domain name issue and the server still exists with all its login info and data intact. If that’s the case we should just be able to change the settings in whatever client we’re using to the new domain name/ip address and everything should work like normal. Unless the server got nuked and there were no backups or something catastrophic.
Anything posted to a community other instances federated with should have been backed up, no?
This is one of many reasons I tell people not to become overly attached to their Lemmy accounts. You don’t know what or who’s hosting your instance and it could just abruptly disappear overnight.
Honestly this is part of the reason I’ve been thinking of spinning up my own instance. Literally just so I have control of the instance my account belongs to.
That is why I did it! Not only for, let’s say, a service that stops, but also for the case where an Admin would decide to go in a direction I don’t want to go.
I’m hoping one day we’ll have federated account management as part of the Fediverse so that you don’t have to spin up a whole Lemmy instance and can create communities that are attached to that.
It will be good when there is an easy way to back up and restore your subs, your blocks and possibly even your comments. If you wish to change instances, it should be easy.
This would be great. I get the value of having instances be separated but starting over is a real pain.
Maybe something about account creation: create the account only for this instance or create it for all/select number of instances? Even something like 5-10 instances “holding onto” your account could prevent things from disappearing without warning unless something really bad went down.
Spitballing here, since my understanding of how this works is ehhhhhhhhh…
The problem with hosting your own instance is that you can’t create a community in another one.
And since they are a central aspect of Lemmy, your experience can still suffer if the instance with one of your favorite communities goes belly up.
Ideally communities should be fully distributed (i.e. not tied to a specific instance) to avoid these issues. Unfortunately, that would lead to its own series of challenges.
Just sign up on small instances to distribute the load they said… 🙃
I do hope they take back their domain name before someone parks it.
Not even that small of an instance relatively speaking
Just run your own instance, I say… that way it’s your fault when you forget to renew the domain name instead of the poor soul running vlemmy.
The domain whois showed it was renewed for years. That’s not the hard part about running an instance, not by a longshot.
I am very aware of what it takes to run a small instance, you are indeed correct that domain registration is not the hardest part.
What is the hardest part? Aside from funding if it’s a personal one. I have a domain I’m barely using and I can think of a funny lemmy url but I think it’s still probably more time and work than I’ll get out of it at the moment
Honestly it depends on what your experience level with running software is and what you want out of it. For me things have been rather smooth sailing as I already host a number of things for myself (so know all about domains, DNS, servers, reverse proxies, docker, etc.) and I am the only one actively using my instance right now so (local or admin-level) moderation isn’t really an issue either.
You lose me at docker. Maybe when I have more time I’ll research it more.
Docker isn’t super necessary, there are some scripts out there that hide a good bit of how it works like the official ansible playbook or lemmy-easy-deploy.
I use docker to easily run many pieces of software in isolation from each other, it’s like VMs if you’re familiar with those, but different in some key ways that don’t really matter for this discussion.
Well I’m not losing lem.monster because I’m not a fucking idiot.
I wonder if something else happened
Probably it was something else since the donation links are down… Hope he isnt in some sort of legal trouble or something, and I dont want to think of worse scenarios of why everything would be shut down so abruptly
this was rather a big instance no?
Indeed, I think number 15 if I remember correctly. I hope that it’s ok, it’s my home instance and is where I was posting the majority of my account content.
Same, I was helping set up a new community and we’d had some new people pop in and start commenting recently. This is a real bummer if its down for good.
I’m thinking it might be down for good, all of the donation links go to closed accounts
What a weird way to go out, yesterday the owner was talking about how to proceed in the future and apologized for having to block an instance
Yeah I read through that post last night. My guess is they got spooked about being potentially liable for anything cached that they may have federated with and just pulled the plug.
The only reason I dont think that is the case is because the donation links are down. I still dont know what happened, I wish someone knew his mastodon or any other social media.
No? Wouldn’t the donation links being down further add credence to this theory?
Yep, more likely intentional than just a technical issue with the website.
I thought you were talking about the idea he was cleaning the servers from such content, but now I see you were actually saying he completely pulled the plug.
So yes, that is a posibility, but not giving any sort of heads up its closing or anything is just weird even if that were the case, this would not constitute a larger admission than what he already did since he already had said he was defederating from an instance to avoid that kind of content. And to my knowledge, as long as they are moderating this stuff social media and the like dont put the owner in trouble, otherwise every ceo of twitter or facebook would have gone to prison a long time ago.
Oh I’m not saying anything specifically. Purely speculation on my part. I just think it wouldn’t be surprising to be completely spooked away even if not actually charged with anything.
I don’t wanna be that kinda person, but it’s possible the owner had some visitation from the local authorities. It’s not uncommon to use a server for multiple things, and I could imagine that there might have been some… not so cool things on there
Well, they only defedded from REDACTED the day before so pretty likely. Hopefully they’re just doing due diligence.
Here’s the post: https://lemmy.world/post/1148656
Porkbun LLC is a DNS registrar, so maybe somebody didn’t pay their bill?
Well, not being owned by a profit-driven evil stab-us-in-the-back company going IPO has advantages and disadvantages :-(
How bad could the bill have been? Was there any prior mention of server costs/donations before this?
I don’t think it is a payment issue. At least in Brazil (where I live), a registration (which can be done directly with the .br registrar, not necessarily third parties) costs less than 10 USD a year.
vlemmy.net was registered less than 2 months ago, for 5 years. I suppose (hope) it was already paid for 5 years.
it’s strange that it’s parked at a dynamic dns service though
aa
I know I’ve forgotten to turn on auto-renew on a domain before. It sucks and caused a lapse. I think most registrars have a cooldown period where you can pay a fee to get your domain back before they release it back into the general pool. It’s usually like 90 days or something.
Yeah, I just thought perhaps it was part of a packaged deal or something. You can get a dot com for about that much. I can’t imagine .net is much more.
How odd. Could it be an account hack? Server malfunction?
Really weird.
dynu.com is a dynamic dns service. I don’t think the maintainer of vlemmy.net would be running the instance from a dhcp (variable) IP, to justify using dynamic dns.
Or is it usual for people to run instances from their homes using common ISP subscriber variable IP addresses?
Even more strange that it was registered just last month, according to whois. Is vlemmy.net that new?
Or is it usual for people to run instances from their homes using common ISP subscriber variable IP addresses?
No. That that would be absolutely ridiculous for anything beyond an ephemeral CounterStrike server.
Aren’t many of these instances a product of the reddit migration? I don’t expect the one I’m on to be much older.
That makes sense. I’m a reddit refugee, just recently joined. Should have checked the domain registration date. I suppose there will be a lot of new instances dying or not being properly maintened in the near future.
Edit: when I couldn’t access vlemmy.net, I signed up to feddit.nl. Just checked the domain registration date; June 1st 2023. Bummer.
Do they have an Open Collective page or something similar? Transparency about servers and costs? Those are the first things to look for in an instance.
Also, for all we know vlemmy could return. We have no details yet.
I found some posts from the creator around the beginning of June letting people know they had just set it up, so it does seem to be fairly new.
If you’re self hosting at home yes dyn dns is far cheaper, and from a users perspective there’s no difference
The server isn’t malfunctioning. Rather, the name
vlemmy.netisn’t given you the IP address of the server anymore. Does anyone have the IP? We could test if the server is still there.Could be a dns server malfunctioning (or rather misconfiguration).
After all, “it’s always DNS”
“It’s not DNS. There’s no way it’s DNS. It was DNS.” My favorite haiku ever
I checked historical data for the A record and came up with this, no clue if this is the original server address
Ran a ping on it and it timed out so I am guessing u/pyarra just pointed the dns to the park page while they figure out what’s going on with this server
I also found that record, but I have no way of knowing how accurate it is. I can confirm that it isn’t responding. We might have to wait and see if/when it returns.
aa
Welp, that sucks, but on the bright side, you can always find a home in the vast fediverse.
Doesn’t look good as the domain goes to a parked page.
It seems dynu.com is a dynamic dns service. Was vlemmy.net running from a variable IP (dhcp) address? Is that usual for lemmy instances?
When I was still making personal websites ~10 years ago there were quite a few hobbyists who were providing free hosting on relatively big servers and I do remember they had dynamic IP addresses as they had the servers running in their homes and it was a bit painful to setup a domain name back then and you needed a dynamic DNS provider. So probably the fact that it’s redirecting to a dynu.com page is a good sign.
This looks probable?
Yes that confirms that it’s hosted in his home, which means likely a dynamic IP address and explains why the domain name is pointing to dynu.com. I think the good news here is that he still has the domain name, it’s just his server that is probably down.
I just checked DNS sales websites, vlemmy.net is still reserved apparently. The web page is still being served half-heartedly and if I let it load a long time the post feed still appears, so I think the server is experiencing some form of critical error.
Not usually for an instance as big as vlemmy.net.
Damn that was the first instance that I signed up for.
I signed up for it just a few days ago (reddit refugee), it was working until earlier today.
I’ve just signed up at feddit.nl now, to be able to post this.
Ya I’m on .ml right now.
This is my main instance. Been solid for weeks since I signed up. I’m using my first from .one now. Not sure where to go for Q&A. Is there a Discord, Mastodon, Gangnam Style’s comment section on YouTube I can goto??
I can’t find anything. Closest I found was a closed donation link. and this
Is it possible he’s just understandably purging the filth from the server within his home?
Oh that’s from him?? Then yeah that’s what this seems like. But that’s exactly what I would do if illegal and risky shit ended up on my server. But I would post to another instance, Mastodon, or something to let users know what’s going on.
(feel bad I forgot his name and obviously can’t check now, he appears to be a great admin)
Google says pyarra but I can’t find him anywhere else. I would think a comment would be good too but maybe he doesn’t want to publically address it further?
Yes I believe that’s him. Yeah, he might be in cold sweat mode. I’ve been there, but not with legal issues just down servers. It sounded like he “was spoken to” by someone about the local laws. That’s gotta suck.
I’d probably close up shop entirely.
Yeah, who knows how good those admin tools are. Maybe he can nuke all content posted to and from certain instances at once?
If anything, given how abrupt this has been, I think either law enforcement told him to pack it in, or his ISP has cut him off
Thank you for posting this, this gives the most insight into the situation I’ve seen yet.
Seems likely he’s either making needed changes to not go to jail, or noping the fuck out.
Time to build a new account I guess
Meta can’t find you then.
Good point, keep zuck on his toes
Oops that’s not good, I can’t access it either
New anxiety unlocked:
- Open Mastodon / Lemmy client
- Find it eternally spinning
- Slight panic
First time on Mastodon it turned out to be temporarily, new with vlemmy, I fear for the worst.
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Download your user data. https://lemmy.ca/post/1292268
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in case of emergency, upload your user data on another instance.
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…
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profitanxiety cured
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I was moderating my small community on vlemmy, and have posted several markdown-heavy things I would like to back up in case I were to move instances. Gladly, that was possible with lemmy.world cache (for everything but pics).
Store your markdown in a git repository. Link it up to VS Code, install a few markdown extensions to make writing easier and more consistent.
You’re a markdown wizard Harry!
Welp… That was where I created the main account I was using.
