I think the thing to worry about is these corporations centrally controlling this data. With one fell swoop, they can do whatever they want with it. With forums, at least they weren’t controlled by one company.
Yes, we just have to collectively make Lemmy grow until it’s a true and complete replacement for classical monolith websites such as Reddit and Facebook groups.
If you search back far enough on some lemmy instances that have defederated others, you’ll find ghosts of old content from those defederated servers, but it’s all local to whatever instance you’re viewing it on. A large amount of the content from the server that went down should also exist on the servers that server was federated with.
These lemmy instances have got to start running out of storage though, I haven’t heard of any kind of automated purging. I’d bet someone somewhere is already working on an archive lemmy.
Speaking explicitly of text, they can likely be compressed to an insane degree instead of purged, if someone wanted to. For comparison, the entirety of Wikipedia (text only) is ~22GB.
Just for context, the full database of feddit.uk compresses down to about 4GB. I am not sure what’s going to happen to the ghosts long term, but I don’t think storage will be a huge issue.
Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it’s archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.
What you’re describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it’s because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.
The admin took off for a business trip and his backup forgot the password and locked himself out. Now the admin seems to have vanished and the server shit itself, making all previously posted pictures unavailable.
The solution is that a bunch of lemmings are forming a “Verein” (Kind of Like a club I suppose?) and will build an entirely new German instance.
If someone hasn’t written a software package to do so already, it’s probably possible to write one to dump and clone all the comments and posts on a server.
The comments fortunately are still there, but the images are all gone. They had some trouble that was image-related which led to the server collapsing at some stage. I can’t recall the specifics unfortunately.
I’ve said this before, the thing I hate about reddit and discord is that you only get exposed to “current” threads or “top” threads. On old forums everything was just there and if someone commented on it, it came back to the top and re-ignited conversations.
I was a big user of the command and conquer forums and I definitely miss the community of it. But that may just be the scale of Internet then compared to now. Back then you saw the same users every day and we ended up chatting on msn and working on projects together. I couldn’t tell you any users on my instance or elsewhere other than the admins of my instance.
As someone who very much “grew up” on vbulletins and irc for better or for worse, I miss this.
But also… I am not sure if them going away is a bad thing. Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation. Specifically moderation of hate and the like. Because when you are "a small group of friends’, it is a lot easier to ignore the guy with “weird vibes”. Same with the people who went out of their way to “keep women out” by insisting on making their signature images so horny that even a diehard Fairy Tail fan would blush.
But, as many of us saw, as those boards get larger? Now you need real moderators. Just having the guy who hosts it in his parents’ basement delete the worst stuff no longer works and now they are asking their friends to be mods. And you basically get the same problem people still complain about on discord where you get very cliquey communities and incredibly biased moderation.
And it inevitably leads to boards either becoming a cesspool of hatred, selling the board to an internet company, or just saying “Fuck all y’all” and shutting it down overnight.
And even stuff like legacy tech support or technical knowledge? Those are already a mess of the top result being some greybeard asshole talking about how OP is a jerk and this is a common problem and they should search for it. Or we have the stack overflow problem where the accepted answer is actually wrong.
But also? For living software, bugs change over time. And plenty of times I have found exactly my symptoms/behavior and… it is for something that was fixed three years ago. So I am now looking at a different bug with the exact same symptoms and basically every search engine is worthless.
And… going back to the moderation aspect: One of the biggest Looking Glass Games or Unreal fansites in existence was still MAYBE a hundred or so people who knew it existed and a couple dozen who cared enough to hang out at the forums. Now? The fansite for a mod for the latest Microprose game is one google search away and might get name dropped by an influencer and have thousands of people swarm overnight. Let alone anyone who gets targeted by the latest hate campaign. There are no “small” communities that aren’t private and spun out of larger ones.
So… I dunno. I very much miss the good old days. But I also increasingly understand those weren’t all that “good”. And communities are so ephemeral that they map well to a discord or even a reddit that people rage delete a few months later.
That was the answer right there. Stuff the assholes in your ignore list and forget that they exist. Too many people on the internet are wanna-be cops out to police everyone else’s ideas, language, or tone. The other person in a dispute is always a Commie or a Fascist and needs to be silenced as quickly and brutally as possible.
The internet wasn’t for normies and making it easy for them to participate was a serious mistake.
I remember when I used to be able to find dedicated message boards for bands that I liked. Now I’m lucky if there’s a subreddit where it’s just a bunch of people submitting poorly drawn fan art of the band.
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