The instance feddit.nl (a Dutch Lemmy instance hosting the largest Dutch communities AFAIK) appears to be down. None of the communities can be accessed anymore.

It made me wonder if the current system of Lemmy/Mastodon decentralized servers isn’t too weak with regard to continuity. I don’t know what’s going on with feddit.nl, but if the administrator doesn’t respond to an issue, hundreds or thousands of users can be cut off from the fediverse without them being able to do anything about it.

And what if an administrator suddenly decides to quit, go on holiday, falls ill etc.?

Does anybody know how one can contact a Lemmy administrator in cases like this?

But also: how do you know if an instance is stable enough to rely on?

Shouldn’t there be some kind of backup, where administrators can contact each other in case of some problem?

And what happens to the communities and content if an administrator permanently shuts down an instance?

  • godless@latte.isnot.coffee
    5·
    11 months ago

    I can reach it just fine. Maybe you need to flush your cache / DNS?

    Generally speaking though, unless they have provided alternative means of contact and you saved them prior to the outage, there’s nothing you can do. Same if they decide to shut down - the instance and your account would be lost, and that’s that.

    Edit: you can look up the owner of the domain on sites like https://who.is, but more often than not they use anonymizer services to not reveal their residential address. The given email address there might however serve as a forwarder to their actual one.