TL;DR, Feddit.UK is down, we’re working on making a fun replacement!
A number of days ago, feddit.uk had kicked the bucket.
The community on there had noticed months ago that the owner was inactive. This was around September (Going off of memory). So they arranged to set up a new community run by the same feddit.uk admins (except the owner, the only one who had host access) which would replace it. However, on the weekend as Quackhouse was going to be launched, the owner responded to an email and made two users admins. Emperor and GreatAlbatross. However, they did not have access to the console, just lemmy adminship. Ever since, the owner has been AWOL. The community were too afraid to go back to setting up Quackhouse incase the owner showed up again.
Unfortunately, that wariness and being afraid led to the worst case scenario happening - Feddit.uk has dropped offline. We believe the instance has reached some form of file size cap. It was basically an aeroplane flying with dead pilots before then. And it appears that aeroplane has crashed.
If you are from the feddit.uk refugee base, please join the new community whenever it is ready. Do not sign up now. We are busy and still setting up and don’t want an influx of new users just yet.
For now, sit tight. I’ll update this post whenever it’s up and running and ready for sign-ups. I am not posting the name for now so we don’t get overrun with sign ups. But we would love to invite you back to our community when it’s set up.
The new community will have it’s own unique identity that doesn’t have to piggyback off of Lemmy and Reddit for it’s name. But it will still aim to be the main UK lemmy instance that feddit.uk was. By all means, it will be a full lemmy instance, still federated, etc. It should be the same experience as feddit.uk. But we actually do have fun plans to create a nice sense of identity with that instance if all goes well! I will warn you, it does have a silly name, but that was the name that was decided upon.
We look forward to having new members. All are welcome, whether or not you were from Feddit.UK or not. We will have the theme be a UK-based lemmy instance.
I’ll try and remember to update this post when we are ready.
~20CX12
Sucks to see the flagship British instance go, but at the same time, I like the idea of all the Reddit references being confined to the past.
I agree. A big objection was if we became big, reddit might be able to sue us.
The whole aim of this new instance is actually trying to see if we can attract some people to come onto it without having to really know what lemmy is. Feddit.uk sounded like a reddit knockoff, and having to explain it sounded confusing. If we could spread the word about the new instance without having to mention federation, as to not be intimidating, people may see the content provided from federation and be happy anyway, and not question the inner workings until they are settled.
You up and running yet?
Not yet, the ones higher than me are… Sorting something out.
We’re currently doing various things behind the scenes - this is definitely something we’ll look into when we can (might be another day or so).
Has enough time passed for a Friendster reference to be ok?
Not a very interesting site:
Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.
We can’t connect to the server at fedster.uk.
deleted by creator
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” - Feddit.UK
It was basically an aeroplane flying with dead pilots before then
aren’t we all
As a fellow UK instance owner - gimme a shout if you need a hand with the setup!
Instance name if you’re taking residents?!
UK bloke with main/only account on Reddthat. Oh the irony!
Lemmy.cafe
It should show up as part of my profile as well.
I’m happy to take residents, although I’ve not been limiting it to UK as feddit.uk had sort of taken that at the time.
The UK has fallen billions must now lurk
Feddit.uk is now back up. I just checked as of now.
I wouldn’t get too excited just yet.
It came up a few times yesterday and quickly went down again.
Seems to be up at the moment still.
Sounds like it went down at the worst moment (right before the holidays, of course) and the admin wasn’t available to bring it back up. If the instance admin is serious about this and wants to keep it running, maybe finding some trustworthy users there that would be willing to act as admins would be a good contingency plan to ensure it doesn’t stay down for long.
Shows once again that federation is useful since other servers are running and you could post that message.
On the other hand, sucks if you had your main account on that server because now you start from scratch. I am not even talking about your lost posts and comments, more about community subscriptions. Quite annoying to get that all in place again. I used to have an account on the fmhy.ml instance, it was not fun…
The answer, in time, is to have a P2P network of federated clients/servers.
So, Usenet. Coming full circle.
Yeah, but now with more…AI.
Somehow it’s up
If you leave it too long, folks will just register for another instance, and all momentum will be gone.
I wouldn’t take too long getting the rescue boat out when folk are in the ocean…
Unfortunately we had planned on getting the boat out before that happened. But it happened anyway. For now the instance seems to be back up, but this was a wake-up call.
My thoughts exactly; from a moderator standpoint it just doesn’t make sense to wait for another UK dedicated instance to open at an unspecified point in the future. It’s too much of an unknown quantity. If I need to move/copy the communities I moderate while I can still access them on feddit, I’m moving them now and to an established, decent sized instance - it’s my best chance of not having to do this again in the future.
Yes, it literally happened with FMHY’s Lemmy instance. Lost access to the original domain, started again from scratch on a different domain, but their users didn’t come back and already moved in to other instances.
Thanks for the update and for the work in building the new instance!
I’ll be keeping my eyes open for further news.
As I mentioned in another discussion, the fediverse needs to work like crypto mining pools, you join the pool of servers that share the data load, but you’re just there for data redundancy, users don’t “sign up to your server”, they “sign up to the website” that all servers are hosting together, if you go offline another server has your data so the website never goes down in the end.
I believe the idea behind different servers not meshing but federating, so they can have different focuses and different moderation stances.
But then you’re still stuck with some kind of central authority, just let people decide what they want to block from their feed instead of relying on an admin to do part of the job for them.
Right now my admin could decide to defederate from a bunch of instances and there’s nothing I could do about it except create a new account elsewhere. Same if they accidently die, all my data will be lost when the server is shut down.
Have a single website with decentralized servers and triple redundancy based on server location? You’re pretty much bullet proof and it becomes much more interesting for small players that don’t want to get too involved… Just give whatever space you’ve got available to the cause and let the software do its thing.
I will warn you, it does have a silly name, but that was the name that was decided upon.
Damn, I was almost going to suggest some stuff. (chippym.uk - chippy, UK, a rodent…)
Serious now. I’m glad that federation means that people aren’t putting all their eggs into the same basket; sure, feddit.uk going MIA is a loss, but just imagine if it was a non-federated platform. Hopefully the old users will be able to build their new home in the new instance.
Good luck and good work!
feddit.uk seems to be online.
Can confirm
I’m getting this:
Error!
There was an error on the server. Try refreshing your browser. If that doesn’t work, come back at a later time.
Now it seems to be up.
And now error again…
I will warn you, it does have a silly name
Why though? A catchy and memorable name, I understand, but why silly? Who wants to say to people they belong to the ‘quackhouse’ instance, or whatever?
It was the one we all agreed upon. Although it is better than “fake reddit UK”.
Who is ‘we all’? I must have missed that day. Any link to the thread?
Everyone who joined the publicly open matrix channel dedicated to setting up a new instance. We couldn’t do it on the open web to prevent domain parking.
