MRW when my Fediverse home is overrun with spam, the sole instance owner/admin/maintainer is missing, repo inactive for months, then the site goes offline for 24 hrs and returns without explanation

The W in MRW stands for When.

argh thank you, I clearly have not had enough coffee yet. I know you can edit titles, I'll just leave it LOL out loud
- Lmao off
- That's twice now, RIP in peace friend
- That’s cool. Have a good one.
- I like to get my cash from the ATM machine
Smh my head.
- Shaking my smh
It stands for Wreaction actually.
My Reaction Wreaction.
- My Real Wreaction when
We need an ATM, but instead of a regular ATM, make it a machine that works automatically as a bank teller
ATM machine
PIN number

I feel like this is a huge problem with Lemmy. All that talk about federation and decentralization and every guide out there for getting started is just like "just register with lemmy.world and don't worry about it". THE WHOLE FREAKING POINT is to avoid one single instance having an outsized influence on the network as a whole.

But choosing an instance to sign up with is such a huge hassle and also kind of a crapshoot. Even if you pick one that seems like a good place to be, it's highly likely the admins will either burn out quickly or just not do their job, and suddenly you're defederated because your instance is full of CSAM. Or they're actually just pieces of shit to begin with.

Fortunately, it seems like I found a decent instance for now. Lemmy.zip has more than one admin, so the burden isn't all on one person, and the main person running it seems to be just a real chill dude. I really hope it lasts.

For quite a while there, Lemmy.world was the only one that handled the reddit apicolypse rush and stayed up reliably. So it became the defacto funnel point to the Fediverse.
Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml were tankie cesspits, Beehaw were too busy sniffing their own farts yo approve registrations, Lemmy.ca gave the impression they were a Canadians-only, eh instance and a pile of others were yet to come on line or be stable. So thats where we are.
There'll be another migration wave and may be there will be more diversification in this one.
- Yeah on 0.19 version
There is another point, which will be maintained still: decentralization allows you to jump ship and still use the service. If lemmy.world gets bought out somehow once it gets big enough, you're free to leave and not lose anything. You can go to another instance or create your own with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the Lemmy instance...
The crapshoot and oversized influence issues are kind of core to how humans do things unfortunately. Even well distributed, the insurance sizes would likely adhere to zipf's law, but the most talkative, and thus the majority of the content, would come from instances where those kinds of people flocked together. And the crapshoot is just decentralized administration being hard.
if it does not last you will ask for a ticket refund

OP you said the quiet part out loud. We aren’t supposed to bring this up because it’s apparently a very touchy subject.

Wait, are you me? That’s my exact experience! But now I’m on lemmy rather than kbin I can use Voyager on my phone, and I’m getting warm and fuzzy Apollo feelings! So maybe I’ll stay…

I lost track of Voyager development, how do you like it so far? I'm getting tired of using the browser on my phone.
- Voyager is great and it’s not even an app. Definitely made the transition from Apollo friendlier for me.
- I lost track of Voyager development, how do you like it so far?
  Better than the web interface for kbin.social that I’ve been using for the last few months.
  It really does feel very Apollo, if that’s a useful reference for you.
  I’m not exactly a power user though, so I can’t promise it’s good for everyone. But hey, it’s free. Give it a go, see how you get on with it. You don’t have to keep it if you don’t want to…
- Definitely my favorite Lemmy app. There’s a few others that definitely have promise that I try out every now and again, but Voyager is my go to.

Hey, glad you're happy with us ❤️

The infra team tries hard to keep the lights on. 🤓

Thanks, glad to be here!
I can tell, outages seem rare and your instance's latency is pretty low (esp compared with others). Props to your DevOps/infra team, everything appears to be solid and reliable.

Its not so bad we got wordle.

Any way to bring comments from one home to another? KBIN being down annoyed me enough that I spun up a lemmy.world account but I'm curious if there's any may to mirror the things I've posted...

I don't remember anything more than this, but I do remember seeing posts about transfer tools. So do some digging and you may find what you need.
- I suspect the answer is no. I know I wasn't able to transfer comments from my prior Lemmy account to this one. I was able to use Sync for Lemmy to transfer my communities, but that was it.

Which one is dead and should we block it?

The main Kbin instance, https://kbin.social. I don't think it warrants a block just yet, but it could become a real problem if the spam in its communities doesn't get under control (i.e. - new mods get added to handle it, for starters). Some communities have been getting hit by spam posters for weeks without end.
There's just one guy running the whole thing. It sucks because it's a good place with good people and the owner is a nice guy, but the lack of administration & communication is killing it.
- This is both the blessing and curse of truly decentralised and people run technology. The "business case" for it is extremely minimal, so people get bored and just start drifting away.
  It's not malicious, it's just how people are.
  Trying to find the few diamonds in the rough to keep everything going and put in the effort is like trying to win the lottery.
  Even with my home lab services I use constantly, it's a chore to keep them updated and bug* free.
- FWIW kbin seems to be back up today. I usually assume when it goes down for long stretches like yesterday that some server maintenance/upgrade is going on, though I do wish the messaging around that was a bit better.

Nice to have you here :) We try our best to be stable and have active moderators!

Thank you, good to be here and nice to meet you! Yeah, everything is solid all around. I know how challenging it can be to maintain, so kudos to you and your team!

It's probably a silly question, but how exactly does one join lemmy.world? I tried making an account here yesterday, got the mail to confirm my email address, confirmed it, and now... nothing. Can't login with the credentials i made, if i do recover password, it says my email address it sent the confirmation mail to is unknown. Or do i just need to wait longer until some admin approves my account?

You probably just need to wait since you account needs to be approved. Alternatively you can join a smaller instance that doesn't require manual approval such as sh.itjust.works (what I'm using)

Welcome! 😎

I'm always hearing about drama and idk I've been having a killer time at sh.itjust.works. practically get no spam

Overrun with spam? I don't see any, and I'm on here all day every day.

There are several communities like https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/newest that are riddled with prescription drug and direct links to pirated content. It has died down recently and it looks like someone or something* has been pruning them, but there's still several links that haven't been scrubbed. I mean, I'm just speculating about who/what is cleaning up, because there's been no administrative communication about...well, anything lately.
I mean, I love the guy, he has been nothing but kind to the userbase, but he's spread himself way too thin and the cracks are really starting to show. There's no oversight, and that is bad. Because some dumbfuck is gonna post something really stupid one of these days, and that instance is gonna get a lot of attention for all the wrong reasons.
- I don't know that I would call four posts by one account all at the same time several days ago as "riddled." I wholly agree with your second paragraph.

Be like me, jump to another seemingly low maintenance fork of kbin. 😂

I see you're on fedia.io, I did consider a couple of the forks for a hot minute. FWIW mbin does have a team working on it, so that's a good start!

I like mander

I don't even know which instance I joined with. Is it possible to move?

You are on lemmy.world you can see it at least in the web browser in lemmy
Hey @FenrirIII@lemmy.world, I looked it up, and there is an upcoming option to move your account in the Lemmy software release version 0.19 :
Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.
Note that this won't export posts and comments. Right now lemmy.world is still using version .18.5 of the server software, and according to this announcement the admin team hasn't upgraded because of stability concerns, which is understandable. But the export feature is coming here, Fyi. Hope this is helpful.
I'm curious, how do you not know which instance you signed up on? Do you access Lemmy from a web browser or an app like Voyager or something? From your profile, it looks like you are registered on lemmy.world, like me.
WRT moving accounts: most people just create a brand new account when they find a new instance they really like, ~~but I remember reading that there's supposed to be a way to export all your user data and import it to another instance...as long as the source and target instances support it, that is.~~ yeah, sorry this is wrong, I think I misremembered, there's no real way yet to move your posts and comments to another instance.
- I can see your instance next to your username when using Eternity.

Check out https://startrek.website. I don't know much about the fediverse, but if you're a Star Trek fan, it's a decent community. Bit quiet in between new seasons.

We've heard bad things about that option recently... And apparently that's why this place exists.
- Well, that sucks.
- Aww, shit.
I'm afraid the Value of that place has been Subtracted.
- Where's reddit gold when you really need it? ;)