Has vlemmy.net lost its domain name?

Dude, this sucks. I signed up for a couple of instances, but that was my main one.

So if it’s gone and unable to come back are all those comments and posts we made there just gone?

The data for the communities is stored on that server, so yes, but only for the content that was actually posted there. Any posts you made from that account will continue to exist on outside communities.

Hopefully, it's just a temporary failure.
- I just wish I could access my account settings, which look like they are stored on the server instead of the app I use. I had already blocked several hundred communities that I wasn’t interested in and I don’t look forward to re-blocking them again (ok, maybe I look forward to it just a little bit, I might have a problem)
I'm in the same boat. I've set up shop at lemm.ee just in case but I still like VLemmy and hope that it comes back online.

This is one of many reasons I tell people not to become overly attached to their Lemmy accounts. You don't know what or who's hosting your instance and it could just abruptly disappear overnight.

Honestly this is part of the reason I’ve been thinking of spinning up my own instance. Literally just so I have control of the instance my account belongs to.
- That is why I did it! Not only for, let’s say, a service that stops, but also for the case where an Admin would decide to go in a direction I don’t want to go.
It will be good when there is an easy way to back up and restore your subs, your blocks and possibly even your comments. If you wish to change instances, it should be easy.
- This would be great. I get the value of having instances be separated but starting over is a real pain.
  
  Maybe something about account creation: create the account only for this instance or create it for all/select number of instances? Even something like 5-10 instances “holding onto” your account could prevent things from disappearing without warning unless something really bad went down.
  
  Spitballing here, since my understanding of how this works is ehhhhhhhhh…
The problem with hosting your own instance is that you can't create a community in another one.

And since they are a central aspect of Lemmy, your experience can still suffer if the instance with one of your favorite communities goes belly up.

Ideally communities should be fully distributed (i.e. not tied to a specific instance) to avoid these issues. Unfortunately, that would lead to its own series of challenges.

Just sign up on small instances to distribute the load they said... 🙃

I do hope they take back their domain name before someone parks it.

Not even that small of an instance relatively speaking
Just run your own instance, I say.... that way it's your fault when you forget to renew the domain name instead of the poor soul running vlemmy.
- The domain whois showed it was renewed for years. That's not the hard part about running an instance, not by a longshot.
Well I'm not losing lem.monster because I'm not a fucking idiot.

I wonder if something else happened
- Probably it was something else since the donation links are down... Hope he isnt in some sort of legal trouble or something, and I dont want to think of worse scenarios of why everything would be shut down so abruptly

this was rather a big instance no?

Indeed, I think number 15 if I remember correctly. I hope that it's ok, it's my home instance and is where I was posting the majority of my account content.
- Same, I was helping set up a new community and we'd had some new people pop in and start commenting recently. This is a real bummer if its down for good.

I'm thinking it might be down for good, all of the donation links go to closed accounts

https://liberapay.com/vlemmy

https://buy.stripe.com/8wM9BI4Vj1vh0GkbIJ

https://buy.stripe.com/5kA3dk4Vja1N60E000

What a weird way to go out, yesterday the owner was talking about how to proceed in the future and apologized for having to block an instance
- Yeah I read through that post last night. My guess is they got spooked about being potentially liable for anything cached that they may have federated with and just pulled the plug.
- I don't wanna be that kinda person, but it's possible the owner had some visitation from the local authorities. It's not uncommon to use a server for multiple things, and I could imagine that there might have been some... not so cool things on there

https://www.whois.com/whois/vlemmy.net

Porkbun LLC is a DNS registrar, so maybe somebody didn't pay their bill?
- Well, not being owned by a profit-driven evil stab-us-in-the-back company going IPO has advantages and disadvantages :-(
How odd. Could it be an account hack? Server malfunction?
- The server isn't malfunctioning. Rather, the name vlemmy.net isn't given you the IP address of the server anymore. Does anyone have the IP? We could test if the server is still there.
- Really weird.
  
  dynu.com is a dynamic dns service. I don't think the maintainer of vlemmy.net would be running the instance from a dhcp (variable) IP, to justify using dynamic dns.
  
  Or is it usual for people to run instances from their homes using common ISP subscriber variable IP addresses?
  
  Even more strange that it was registered just last month, according to whois. Is vlemmy.net that new?

Welp, that sucks, but on the bright side, you can always find a home in the vast fediverse.

I did, on feddit.nl, to be able to post this :)

Then I realized the feddit.nl domain was registered less than 2 months ago.

Luckily I don't care about upvote balance (if I did, I'd probably have stayed in reddit as a karma hostage), so I'll just keep hopping instances if they stope working.

Doesn't look good as the domain goes to a parked page.

It seems dynu.com is a dynamic dns service. Was vlemmy.net running from a variable IP (dhcp) address? Is that usual for lemmy instances?
- When I was still making personal websites ~10 years ago there were quite a few hobbyists who were providing free hosting on relatively big servers and I do remember they had dynamic IP addresses as they had the servers running in their homes and it was a bit painful to setup a domain name back then and you needed a dynamic DNS provider. So probably the fact that it's redirecting to a dynu.com page is a good sign.
- Not usually for an instance as big as vlemmy.net.

Damn that was the first instance that I signed up for.

I signed up for it just a few days ago (reddit refugee), it was working until earlier today.

I've just signed up at feddit.nl now, to be able to post this.
- Ya I’m on .ml right now.

This is my main instance. Been solid for weeks since I signed up. I’m using my first from .one now. Not sure where to go for Q&A. Is there a Discord, Mastodon, Gangnam Style’s comment section on YouTube I can goto??

I can't find anything. Closest I found was a closed donation link. and this

Is it possible he's just understandably purging the filth from the server within his home?
- Oh that’s from him?? Then yeah that’s what this seems like. But that’s exactly what I would do if illegal and risky shit ended up on my server. But I would post to another instance, Mastodon, or something to let users know what’s going on.
  
  (feel bad I forgot his name and obviously can’t check now, he appears to be a great admin)
- Thank you for posting this, this gives the most insight into the situation I've seen yet.
  
  Seems likely he's either making needed changes to not go to jail, or noping the fuck out.

Time to build a new account I guess

Meta can't find you then.
- Good point, keep zuck on his toes

Oops that's not good, I can't access it either

I was moderating my small community on vlemmy, and have posted several markdown-heavy things I would like to back up in case I were to move instances. Gladly, that was possible with lemmy.world cache (for everything but pics).

https://lemmy.world/u/(user)@vlemmy.net

https://lemmy.world/c/(community)@vlemmy.net

Store your markdown in a git repository. Link it up to VS Code, install a few markdown extensions to make writing easier and more consistent.

You're a markdown wizard Harry!

New anxiety unlocked:

Open Mastodon / Lemmy client
Find it eternally spinning
Slight panic

First time on Mastodon it turned out to be temporarily, new with vlemmy, I fear for the worst.

Download your user data. https://lemmy.ca/post/1292268

in case of emergency, upload your user data on another instance.

...

~~profit~~ anxiety cured

Welp... That was where I created the main account I was using.

Another user here that had set up VLemmy as primary instance. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to back up subscriptions and how to do due diligence on an instance to make sure that it is more credible/stable?

I have relaunched on Lemm.ee, and want to make sure that I am prepared for this happening again!

In addition to the other suggestions, I have just published lemmy2opml which allows you to export your subscribed communities to an OPML file. You can then import that file to a different account.
See the comment here by @[email protected] for an unofficial tool they made.
- Looks like that only works if the instance is still online...

I thought the server must have been down or something since it's weekend. Admin of that instance was asking for help regarding administrators for running the instance.

Rip my main account I guess. Hopefully it comes back.

Edit: I don't see it listed on join-lemmy.org atm

And here's me owning lemmy.cfd with nothing do use it for, so I'm just routing it to a community lookup

i was going to wait a day or two to see if it came back but it looks like it's still down, made this alt on feddit like 2 minutes ago hoping for vlemmy to come back lol

dammit now im gonna have to resubscribe to like 50 communties

This was meant to be a reply.

This was meant to be a parent comment.

Well there goes my main account!