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.
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
As I mentioned in another discussion, the fediverse needs to work like crypto mining pools, you join the pool of servers that share the data load, but you’re just there for data redundancy, users don’t “sign up to your server”, they “sign up to the website” that all servers are hosting together, if you go offline another server has your data so the website never goes down in the end.
Yeah, unless I own all my own data, the Fediverse doesn’t really solve anything. Sure, I could host a server just for me, but if everyone did that would it even work? Or would it collapse under the load of all the data whizzing about behind the scenes?
This seems like a much better way, in many ways it would be more robust. There would be problems though… This would be even more vulnerable to EEE. Disputes/hostile action between servers could damage the whole website (I’m talking about maliciously hosting CSAM for example).
It’s an issue with the current method too and hosts could decide if they host NSFW content or not with the risk and curation responsibilities that entails if they do (as we can see with Pornhub you can get in trouble for hosting porn stuff that isn’t CSAM).
I doubt that if one server was hosting CSAM that law enforcement is going to be charitable with the rest of the site just because technically it was just one server. I’m admittedly not at all sure of the legal precedent here… But I suspect the site would be judged as a whole, if not by the law then certainly by the public.
It’s already a thing on Lemmy at the moment and it’s not as if people were talking about the various instances as separate websites when they talk about Lemmy.
It would be fairly easy to have a post info page that mentions what servers (including redundancies) the content is hosted on.
Anyway, the ideal solution would be that NSFW content has its own website (LemmXXX! I’m a genius) separate from the rest so as not to potentially create legal issues.
Feddit.uk is now back up. I just checked as of now.
The UK has fallen billions must now lurk
I will warn you, it does have a silly name, but that was the name that was decided upon.
Damn, I was almost going to suggest some stuff. (chippym.uk - chippy, UK, a rodent…)
Serious now. I’m glad that federation means that people aren’t putting all their eggs into the same basket; sure, feddit.uk going MIA is a loss, but just imagine if it was a non-federated platform. Hopefully the old users will be able to build their new home in the new instance.
Will there be contingency to stop this from happing with other instances?
Will there be contingency to stop this from happing with other instances?
That depends how each instance is set up, just like any other website.
There are community efforts like building a culture of moderators reaching out to each other
We’re making a contingency for the new instance
Thanks for the update and for the work in building the new instance!
I’ll be keeping my eyes open for further news.
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?
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.
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?
yikes. hope this gets sorted out soon
And here I was wondering where it went…
