Hi Everyone.

Please excuse the potentially rambling nature of this post, as I’m a bit drunk and emotional.

It’s been a while - I know our tiny little Lemmy instance isn’t the biggest or most active ever, and I mostly lurk myself these days.

Still, I truly have faith in the promises of a kinder, federated internet, in spite of the events of the recent presidential election in the US.

Running this site has been a fun hobby for me. I’m especially grateful to all of y’all that stuck around and continue to use it as your portal to the fediverse. I learned some things about deploying web services, got to see some funny memes, and it overall was a pretty pleasant time.

This site runs on personal server hardware that I maintain myself. As I wanted to keep the scope and costs small as a hobby project, I chose not to go with any hosting provider or other service, and I elected to be the sole admin of the instance.

For personal reasons, due to the US presidential election, It’s not going to be safe for me to continue to live where I currently do. This is going to require a pretty big upheaval of my life and work - caught in that upheaval is my ability to continue hosting this server for the indefinite future. I’d love to continue participating in the fediverse as a server host someday, but that’s not going to be possible for me for a while.

I don’t have a set date to take everything offline yet, but possumpat.io will be taken offline indefinitely sometime before the new administration is inaugurated on Jan 20, 2025. When I have a more concrete date available, I will share as an edit in this post.

I plan on keeping a backup of the database and everything, so if I’m ever in a position to be able to bring back our humble little possum space, I’ll do so.

If you’re one of the few still using the site, again I thank you. If you want to stay in touch for a potential revival in the future, or just 'cuz, shoot me a DM and I’ll invite you to the mod discord (it’s pretty dead silent in there, there’s not much to mod with how well reports are handled cross-instance now).

Keep being cool out there my fediverse friends, and stay safe.

  • variantsEnglish
    4·
    3 months ago

    I think if the server is going to go down I might prefer that we just dont keep a database backup and let it go, if possum patio comes back we can start fresh. I believe there are ways to migrate your settings and subscriptions to a new server as well for anyone that plans to move

    • Nothing4You@programming.dev
      2·
      18 days ago

      unfortunately restarting fediverse software on the same domain doesn’t really work well with all other software and without local fixes.

      activitypub uses cryptography for authentication and there isn’t a standard for changing keys / reusing identities, so different software will deal with this in different ways.

      reusing URLs for posts and comments is even more problematic and will definitely cause broken federation with other lemmy instances as well.

      if it was decided to recreate an instance from scratch in the future that’d best be done on a new (sub-)domain.

      if the database was saved it should work just fine to rebuild the instance from that, it’ll probably just take a few days to restart federation everywhere.

      I’m not suggesting either way, just providing some technical background.