So after we’ve extended the virtual cloud server twice, we’re at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.
Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.
So the bad news… we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )
For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon
Thanks!
Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores “Rome” CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.
I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it’s back. After that I’ll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @[email protected] for assisting with that.
I’m less concerned with the technical aspects and more curious about the long term.
Federated instances, such as lemmy.world, are operated by individuals; What happens if they decide to stop doing so without handing the server/data off to someone else? Do all of our accounts created here disappear? What do other users see if they click through my profile from a post on a different federated server? What happens to all of the content created on the server in question?
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It would be gone.
The federated design has got people already thinking about it though. It’s inevitable that some instances will just close without notice. So people are trying to figure out the best way to handle it, from archiving/mirroring to creating an export account feature.
It’s very early days and the projects will be developed quite extensively I imagine, this is a chance for some people like myself to contribute to new features and make a real impact on its future.