I think we need a way to have lemmy handle “netsplits” more like IRC and less like “community went poof”. IDK if people are working on this (making the communities distributed), but I think there are existing technical solutions that can be leveraged if the devs don’t want to solve it themselves.
I’ve seen some active instances die due to admin neglect (not paying the bills, for instance), and I’ve wondered how those communities have fared since, since they’d have to start over elsewhere, and without all the content and history from their origin server. Same goes with user accounts too.
I like the way matrix does it. Each (Chat) Room has it’s own globaly unique id. When you create it, you create the room with the ID and a Lookup entry that says #room:matrix.org -> ID. When you join a room you can then publish it in the room directory of your own home server. That adds a lookup of #coolRoomIFound:myown.org -> ID To you own server. The room can be joined with either name. If the original server goes down all the existing users can still comunicate and invite new people by publishing new lookup entries.
I would love if lemmy had a function like this as well to have the same community accessible over two different names.
