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
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/hellointernet@feddit.uk, 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.
You can see the content but not, afaik, move the community or take ownership of it. I'm afraid you'll have to recreate it somewhere more stable.
Maybe servers need a contingency plan to be able to communicate with users as to backup options in case one goes down?
I wonder what happens if somebody recycles a domain that was previously used for another instance... I feel like everything is going to break.
Federation will break.
I guess I'm kind of asking / supposing, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if lemmy / activitypub doesn't really work that way.
As in, posts to feddit.uk are stored on feddit.uk. If you read a thread from sh.itjust.works/c/whatever@feddit.uk then sh.itjust.works server will pull it down from feddit.uk and show you the post. It may even cache a copy of the post to show it to another user, but that's not the same as backing up the post.