8
After a month and a half downtime all the users will have moved on to other instances. This is essentially a death sentence for the instance and its communities.
You underestimate the userbase. I made a temp account in the mean time, but we are a hyper tight knit community. We will probably lose accounts - no question - but the core userbase will return
I think the migration to Piefed would be worse. Piefed is great, but needs better App support for Lemmy users to migrate. A merge of the Thunder fork into main Thunder would get the ball rolling.
Tag @Kris@feddit.org
On Android you can use the Interstellar app https://interstellar.jwr.one/ with piefed.social! Also iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/JXRtHye2
I think now that Piefed has an API for apps, we will see some of them adding support soon. Overall I think the benefits of a Piefed migration outweight the disadvantages, but it remains to be seen if it is doable.
you mean an API for bots...
Mobile Apps need an API too.
why does everything need a mobile app?
It's not just native Apps. Alternative web UIs like Thunder, Photon and Voyager need them too.
yes, but those frontends are typically tied closer to the backend than a public API.
things like CSRF can help block abuse of the back end.
Nope they all use the public API. Even the default Lemmy web client.
well that's poor planning and why bots are such a problem.
I know CSRF tokens aren't a silver bullet, but doing nothing to stop them does nothing to stop them.
Alt text:
Slrpnk.net is currently offline due to an unforseen hardware failure in combination with the main system-administrators having no physical access to the server location until mid July due to work or summer-holiday related travels.
We are very sorry for this unforseen down-time, but slrpnk.net will return for sure and we already have some plans for a nice relaunch, so stay tuned!
Don't pull a feddit.de on people, alright?
What exactly happened there? It was the big thing, then I didn't use it for a month or so and then it was gone.
The admin basically ran it as a one man show with only one other admin who had very limited privileges. He then went on a "business trip" or workaction or longterm vacation - there were different stories. Anyway, the database went belly up, the other admin couldn't do a thing and none could contact the admin. There are some rumours that he wasn't who he claimed he was and actually was a Chinese national who simply returned home, but who knows that. As a matter of fact none had any meaningful contact with him for months then and it appears he did not return. (But is alive)
A Austrian NGO who amongst others does host some mastodon instances,etc. took over and now feddit.org is on a very productive, professional and transparent level.
Thanks for the summary! That sounds freaky!
Well, the trade-off between trusting a huge corporation or a single dude on the internet.
XKCD #2347
Ya gotta give a line from it or something, I don't just see numbers and know what they are.
from context, it's probably the "single dude in nebraska holding up the entire internet" one
e: holy shit I got the state right
That sucks.
Wondering if a volunteer could go to the physical location necessary to restore service. If it's in Athens Greece, I can make the trip.
Edit: The server is located in Azores, the flight would cost 415eur, I cannot afford that, maybe someone in Portugal could help?
Is it in a data centre or someone's house? If the latter, would they let a stranger in?
Surely they would need a backup and replicate db to so in case of hardware failure they switch over.
Sounds like they could improve their setup.
Too much of a single point of failure.
Slrpnk.net admin here.
The failure seems to have been in the main firewall, if it had been the server itself we could have easily restored it on another server from the backups on another machine. But as it stands, remote access is entirely cut off.
There usually is another person with hardware access, but they are on summer holidays. This seemed like an acceptable risk at the time...
An off-site backup would have been nice of course, but due to the costs involved in running an Lemmy instance of that size on a rented server, it would have not been a great option either.
I have plans to add a KVM to the main firewall via a secondary connection, but even that might have not helped in this case. I'll know more when I have physical access again.
I've done a lot of SysAdmin and DCOps stuff in the past so, thought I'd give you some plausible suggestions (haven't dug deep into Lemmy DB stuff and DNS/Federation of the stack, so not sure all is practical).
Scenario 1 - Preserve and merge when access is restored
Setup
- Spin up two VMs/VPS (or one that has enough grunt for two Lemmy servers). Call them
robak.slrpnk.netandslrpnk.netand point DNS appropriately. - Pull federated content from other instances and place it on robak, set as read-only.
- Sync important comms to (new) slrpnk.net without content.
- Allow users to sign up, vetting as possible (all mods). Keep a list of those that are vetted (call it vetted.list). Inform all users that any non-vetted users will have their content dropped when access is restored.
Merge!
- Once access is restored, ensure that (old) slrpnk.net is set to read-only.
- Schedule a maintenance window (announce more time than you are likely to need).
- During the maintenance window, put (new) slrpnk.net into R/O, or just block external access.
- Query the db on (old) slrpnk.net for all users.
- Subtract the vetted users from vetted.list from the list.
- Drop all records from the resulting list of non-vetted users from (new) slrpnk.net.
- Insert the records from vetted and new users (those without conflicts) into the DB on (old) slrpnk.net.
- Validate that everything is working
- Cut over DNS and spin down the new VMs/VPS.
Scenario 2 - Server is in DC or Admin able to facilitate access
- Get a db dump/backup.
- Spin up temporary slrpnk.net on a VM/VPS.
- Use backup of temporary server to restore data to original, when possible.
What is so special about piefed? I see a few communities moving there. The interface looks different from the original lemmy interface.
Our sysadmin explained some technical advantages here: https://feddit.org/post/13613230/7063696
Postgres slowing factor
~~I'm pretty sure one of the best optimised free/libre DBMS's is faster than Python ๐~~
EDIT: skimmed it wrongly, see corrections below
Also no one knows how Piefed scales, since it only has like 350 MAU
"unforseen hardware failure"
somebody didn't check their backups!
The backups are most likely fine ๐
yes, that's why it's been down for this long...
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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