TL;DR: all of the content of closed, centralized services will be lost in the long run. Choose the platform you contribute to wisely now instead of learning through more large data loss events later-on.

  • @k_o_t
    link
    73 years ago

    yeah, so much quality content, interesting experiences, research papers etc is concentrated on reddit it’s scary tbh

    with them locking out web-based mobile page visits i wouldn’t be surprised it’s just the beginning

  • DessalinesA
    link
    63 years ago

    We also have an issue to be able to do data exports, but I haven’t started working on it yet. Reddit only lets you export your (i think 1000?) most recent items.

    • @iszomer
      link
      3
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      deleted by creator

    • @tolacag
      link
      23 years ago

      I wanted to ask a question about future plans regarding data exports. Are there any plans about being able to export/import entire communities in addition to just user-level data imports/exports? I’m thinking about starting my own instance at some point in the future, but I’m also thinking about starting a few communities on here in the meantime and would like to possibly migrate those communities (with all their posts/comments included) to my own instance when I feel I can commit more time to managing an instance of my own. I could see a feature like that being very useful for anyone else who’s considering migrating communities between instances, so I thought I’d ask if there were any plans for that being discussed.

      • DessalinesA
        link
        33 years ago

        We haven’t really thought about community migration / import and export, it’d be as complicated and difficult as user migration would be from one server to another.

        Another difficult part about it would be the changed activity pub URL from a certain point in time… but it might be doable in some voy.

      • @nutomicA
        link
        23 years ago

        No concrete plans, but you can open an issue (if there isnt already one).

    • @AgreeableLandscape
      link
      2
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      I believe Reddit exports all of your data, but it takes days from requesting to getting your data package, and you can only do so once every 30 days. The API and site only display up to 1000 items.

  • @DrivingForce
    link
    53 years ago

    Is federated platforms really that much better? I don’t know how hard it would be to get your data off a federated instance that banned you for example.

    What do you need to do to get your data from instances?

    • @disrooter
      link
      53 years ago

      If federated platforms mean Mastodon or Lemmy alone then no, but if people will use their own blog federated together with ActivityPub and so with Mastodon, Lemmy ecc then it would be much better. The interactions of today social networks plus the longevity of personal web sites.

    • @koavfOP
      link
      33 years ago

      Federated platforms aren’t as liable to become centralized (this is my supposition, we’ll see). I mitigate this by posting the same content to multiple instances of Mastodon. As disrooter mentions, redundancy with your own site is best.

  • @brombek
    link
    43 years ago

    You realize that lemmy.ml is a DEV server that can go away any moment, it probably is not even backed up :D

    Said that I think you are right to be concerned and that federated open software can fix this by implementing open and easily accessible ways to migrate and archive data - something that closed network-effect ad driven corporate platform would never allow to happen.

    • DessalinesA
      link
      83 years ago

      Just a note: We back up this server every hour, and when we turn this from the dev to the main instance, all the data is staying.

    • Maya
      link
      63 years ago

      there is an indieweb concept called PESOS-- Post Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site. I use the (awesome!) user RSS feed Lemmy exposes to grab everything I post here. I reformat it into files that go into my static site generator so everything lands on my personal site.

    • @brombek
      link
      23 years ago

      Also federation basically means copying data all over the place so by itself federating helps to keep data alive.

      Like with Git if my repo server dies every dev has pretty much full copy of the repo so I am not worried.

  • @forgotmylastusername
    link
    4
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    The way I see it it’s also basically click working. Each post or comment no matter how mundane contributes to their bottom line. The web hasn’t been this centralized and walled before. We’ve seen the ebb and flow of platforms through out the years. This time around the platforms have cornered parts of the web. I really wonder where it goes from here.

    • @koavfOP
      link
      03 years ago

      Did you read the article?

        • @koavfOP
          link
          -13 years ago

          Well, it explicitly mentions Hacker News, so why did you bring it up here?

          • @federico3
            link
            -13 years ago

            Because it’s understated and not in the title.

            • @koavfOP
              link
              13 years ago

              The title doesn’t mention a lot of things: that’s why it’s worth reading the article. It also says “like”.