This is my current understanding of the situation:

• The admins are no longer interested in running the instance, due to increasing demand, missing moderation features and waves of abuse from external actors.
• Transferring the instance to someone else is a complicated issue. Even though there is not a large amount of private information in Lemmy's database, you can not simply transfer the trust the users placed in the original admin to the new owner.
• Lemmy still does not provide an easy way to migrate accounts

Given all the above, shutting down the instance seems to be the natural course of action. I'd like to propose an alternative: freeze the instance activity and keep it in some form of "read-only" mode until Lemmy matures.

What would that require?

0. Take the instance down (no more incoming activities)
1. Run a script that generates static json files for every actor (user, community), federated object (post, comment, report) and activity (like/dislike votes, announce activities, etc)
2. Set up a static site to serve all that JSON.
3. Take the media on pict-rs and move to some long-term back up system.
4. (Optional, but could be helpful in the future) allow users to checkout the private keys of their own user and community actors.

This won't help solve the current problems and it wouldn't help with the users who now will have to move away to a new instance, but it could eventually help for users who want to restore the activity on a new server.

I've been experimenting with an implementation for Decentralized Identifiers for ActivityPub that can make it possible for people to move servers but maintain their identity (similar to bluesky's PLC directory), so perhaps we could have a future where users can fully migrate their accounts from server to server without requiring intervention from admins.

Please, tell me how "paying for hardware costs is enough"...

cross-posted from: https://communick.news/post/2494298

If you are not aware, sportbots is a project that mirrors Twitter accounts from popular sport reporters, players and the leagues themselves. These bots are presented as regular ActivityPub actors, which means that they can be followed from Mastodon and any other AP service that is oriented towards microblogging.

With my work on Fediverser and the ActivityPub Toolkit, I'm realizing that we could do something similar for Lemmy. The Fediverser system could keep a database of these bots accounts and then map them to the relevant Lemmy instances/communities.

I'd like to get some opinions on how best to do this. Here are some of my ideas, in order of preference:

1. Reach out to the developer behind sportbots.xyz and ask them to add this integration directly, to make sure that the bots post not just to Mastodon-like systems, but to groups as well.

Pros: it can be very straightforward. No new bots being created on the Fediverse. Cons: the code seems to be closed, so we have to rely on the dev to implement this.

2. Add the functionality to Fediverser to map mastodon/twitter/bluesky accounts to Lemmy mirror bots, and also map these accounts to the specific communities where they should be posting.

Pros: Accounts could be eventually be used by the real owner. Open source. Cons: More bots in the Fediverse (not at alien.top scale, though). Not that many Lemmy admins seem interested in deploying Fediverser so far.

3. Create a separate project from Fediverser that does what sportbots is doing, but focused on Lemmy.

Pros: most flexible. Could be easier for other people to run it if interested. I would be sure to open source it. Cons: It's yet-another project that I would be taking on, and I don't have any more bandwidth for new projects unless they are guaranteed to bring some revenue.

Please, let's avoid any "who cares about sports?" or "I only want organic content here" type of discussion. We need content here if we want to get more people to stay active and if you don't care about sports or the bots, just feel free to block them.