Are people backing up the fediverse?

#fediverse

Most fediverse platforms are run by common users, not entities with either monetary, commercial, political or geopolitical interests to keep the platforms alive. But that also means the instances could disappear when money gets tight, if the interest dies out, if there are technical difficulties that are hard to deal with, etc.

This brings me to the opening question, are people taking at least what they find relevant from the fediverse, and backing it up on web archival services, or at least backing up locally as screenshots, HTML/MHTML files, etc., so if their instance or the propagated contents die, at least there is a register the content ever existed?

@fediverse@piefed.social

  • Lehmuusa@nord.pubEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    This apparently is a problem on Mastodon. But, the Forumverse (PieFed/Lemmy/MBin) has a design that mitigates this.

    See for example the case of lemm.ee. It went down. Yet, here’s an example of its content being live and (somewhat) kicking: https://lemmy.world/c/movies@lemm.ee .
    Their closure was known before, so communities names were appropriately changed.

    How the Forumverse works is that each instance that has at least one user subscribed to a comm makes a full copy of all of the comm’s text material whenever something gets published there. What, however, goes missing is the ability to propagate the content between instances. That would be the job of lemm.ee, in this case. If you now go and write a comment at https://piefed.social/c/movies@lemm.ee , it will never be visible when viewed from within other instances. In other words, whatever you comment there, will not be visible on https://lemmy.world/c/movies@lemm.ee, because you are not a user of lemmy.world and nobody’s there to federate the content.

    I wish Forumverse comms had some kind inheritance tag so that a comm could tell what instance should gain the right/responsibility to do the federation work if the comm’s original instance is confirmed to have gone belly-up. If that was done, comm’s would be essentially eternal. Now it’s a bit of a weird situation that you have comms that look completely existant and where it looks like you can even comment, but the comments won’t propagate anywhere.

    But the content is still there. If you subscribe to a community, it means all of that community’s text content (but not images!) will be backed up on your home instance’s server.

    • Auster@thebrainbin.orgOP
      2·
      3 days ago

      Small point, but about fetching posts from dead instances, I was able to do it previously by pulling comments’ direct links when the commenter is from an external instance. Just don’t remember if I did it from Lemmy or Mbin.

      • Lehmuusa@nord.pubEnglish
        6·
        3 days ago

        Nope. There’s no other way to fetch those posts than to view them through some instance that already has them. Things will get saved on a Forumverse instance from the moment someone subscribes to the community.

        Lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and lemmy.zip are examples of instances that have existed for a long time and are well federated. Almost anything gets backed up by them, because almost any comm has users from those instances.

        • Auster@thebrainbin.orgOP
          2·
          3 days ago

          So it must’ve been Mbin then. All your examples list Lemmy-powered instances, and I did pull some posts through their comments.

          • Lehmuusa@nord.pubEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            You can manually pull individual posts on PieFed and Lemmy as well. But at least those two don’t have a “pull the whole post history” feature per se.

            Two PieFed instances do communicate the post history upon subscription. And, I think, comments as well? But PieFed cannot do that with Lemmy.

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    The fediverse is approximately the part of the Internet that is least in need of anyone actively backing it up.

    After all, all messages here are copied to many servers, each of them already serves as a backup. One more backup doesn’t make much of a difference.

  • scytale@piefed.zipEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    I think stuff is getting backed up or collected somewhere either way. With the way federation works, anyone can spin up an instance and just store whatever they want from the instances they are federated with regardless of intent, malicious or not.

  • Snoopy@piefed.socialMEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    I wonder if backing up the fediverse is a good idea. I have a mixed opinion about it. I think not all data should be saved. I believe we can delete them after 3-5 years.

    There is no point on keeping every stuff we created there. Maybe for history purpose on how we lived here ? On old computer ? On good photo and memory ? Nostalogia ?

    Dunno…internet and memory from past is an interesting topic.

    Edit: typo

      • Snoopy@piefed.socialMEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        Yes but do all my interaction here need to be saved ? I will forgot overtime and never look back. We can create a story like a tatoo.

        And that takes lot storage space, should my data remain that long ? If it was a newpaper, a personal blog, a diary, bookmark…i would save them.

        • terabyterex@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          anthropologists would find it useful. look, i have said tons of stupid stuff too bit its anout the information as a whole.

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    I don’t, I use it mostly as write only. But for things I do want to keep I have a blog and post it there and just cross post to PieFed.