I imagine users go poof. Are their profiles stored in other federated instances? Is there a way to recover them or “import from backup” onto another instance?

If they don’t have an e-mail I imagine you can’t even notify them or authenticate them elsewhere so this “import from backup” even if technically feasible (idk if it is) would be impossible in practice due to authentication issues.

And communities, can you even notify all your subscribers to move to the “backup community” on another instance? I saw yesterday that a Mastodon server host said “I’m deleting this instance in 2 days” or something like that and I started wondering how shit would go on Lemmy.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    My instance has grown to a few hundred megabytes in size for the messages (almost all coming in from other servers) and then there are the files.

    That’s for about 422k entries in the database, so I’m pretty sure all the communities I’m following are the cause. At that point, I don’t think it’d matter if I hosted five people on my server or five thousand; their posts are probably going to end up on my server anyway.

    And besides, I don’t need a long term copy of all that data. I can probably purge data every week to keep the database to a few hundred megabytes or so.

    Going by this post a $12 VPS with 500GB of storage should do just fine for years if you don’t accept too many files. All of Wikipedia is about 20GB of text, but image files will probably be your biggest issue.

    There’s a risk of user rush, but Lemmy’s design allows for manual approval of all user accounts. If you don’t want to run the risk of exceeding your bounds (or dealing with moderation fallout) then only allowing you and your friends would be a perfect middle ground.