I joined mastodon.xyz a few years ago and never had any problems. Then today I tried to sign on and couldn’t. The server simply isn’t reachable. I can (and have) created a new instanceuaccount on a new server, but losing all my data has me concerned. What should I do with my new account so I don’t lose everything if this instance also disappears someday?
They were down for maintenance.
I’m not being a shit and am completely being honest, but this is a risk that comes with servers vanishing. You could always host your own instance, but that’s beyond most non-technical people. So, unfortunately it could happen again. Your best bet might be picking one of the more populated instances and hoping for the best.
Look for an instance that has adopted the Mastodon Server Covenant, points 3 and 4 deal with this situation. It’s just a promise, not a guarantee, but most people running such instances are doing it because they care deeply about their community.
You don’t even have to host your own yourself. There are several companies in the market which will host your personal instance for you for just a few $/€. Like a Webhoster. You have your own instance, but of course you don’t have full access to the server and data. Only the admin interface, just like simple Webhosting. The benefit: you don’t have to care about maintenance.
Looks like https://mastodon.xyz is up again now.
Extended downtime is common for community-run servers like this. Remember, even if the server is down for a full day every year, it’s still have 99.73% uptime! Chasing 99.999% uptime (like the big tech) for a community-run server is not reasonable because the cost (money and manpower) to do so is exponentially higher with every “9” you add in your uptime.
FWIW, today was a critical patch that the Mastodon project asked admins to apply right away, requiring some downtime. I suspect XYZ maintains the server covenant that another poster shared.
In settings on Mastodon you can export your data, and import on a new instance.
Lemmy definitely needs to have an account migration feature. I’m sure the developers already realize this, but it’s just a matter of time and effort to create it (like everything else). Hopefully we will see something come out in the not too distant future.
Yeah hopefully we get some decentralized user account service based on IPFS or something. My biggest fear always with online stuff is that someone is just gonna pull the plug and I’ll never see my account and its data again. I hope we get to a point where I don’t have an account on Beehaw or whatever instance, but I have an account in my personal account space that I allow to connect to an instance.