Welcome to the new era of enshittification where you'll eventually have to subscribe to access or make posts, and none of it will be searchable on any search engines.
Anyway, I think all this is a result of thieves in governments becoming conscious of how the Web works and breaking it with the means they have - helping corps and making litigation more and more likely for anything small and well-behaving, because of failing to remove something etc.
It just makes sense. In 2005 with all the problems with search engines of that time, and with having to use web directories and ask people, you had a lot of information at the tips of your fingers. You could read a lot of things about people who would prefer to do their stuff more confidentially, like mafia bosses and bureaucrats and politicians.
Forums are alive and well when looking for car info. Whenever I get a different car I look for communities with the most activity and that is usually a forum.
The one exception I can think of (proving the post to be true) is the first generation Tundra (2000-2007). The FB group had more current news than the forums and I managed to get banned (first time ever).
We need help communities on Lemmy. That's what is going to make it rank in SEO and fly. Communities like software help (office, adobe creative products, etc), financial help and advice. And ask docs communities.
Even many fans don't get this reference now, sadly. The DVD set it was on is long out-of-print and Tjardus Greidanus won't grant them the rights to re-release it. He also sends takedowns to anyone who uploads The Final Sacrifice to YouTube.
It really sucks when one of the best episodes of a TV show can't bee seen.
I think the thing to worry about is these corporations centrally controlling this data. With one fell swoop, they can do whatever they want with it. With forums, at least they weren't controlled by one company.
Yes, we just have to collectively make Lemmy grow until it's a true and complete replacement for classical monolith websites such as Reddit and Facebook groups.
If you search back far enough on some lemmy instances that have defederated others, you'll find ghosts of old content from those defederated servers, but it's all local to whatever instance you're viewing it on. A large amount of the content from the server that went down should also exist on the servers that server was federated with.
These lemmy instances have got to start running out of storage though, I haven't heard of any kind of automated purging. I'd bet someone somewhere is already working on an archive lemmy.
Speaking explicitly of text, they can likely be compressed to an insane degree instead of purged, if someone wanted to. For comparison, the entirety of Wikipedia (text only) is ~22GB.
Just for context, the full database of feddit.uk compresses down to about 4GB. I am not sure what's going to happen to the ghosts long term, but I don't think storage will be a huge issue.
The admin took off for a business trip and his backup forgot the password and locked himself out. Now the admin seems to have vanished and the server shit itself, making all previously posted pictures unavailable.
The solution is that a bunch of lemmings are forming a "Verein" (Kind of Like a club I suppose?) and will build an entirely new German instance.
If someone hasn't written a software package to do so already, it's probably possible to write one to dump and clone all the comments and posts on a server.
The comments fortunately are still there, but the images are all gone. They had some trouble that was image-related which led to the server collapsing at some stage. I can't recall the specifics unfortunately.
I've said this before, the thing I hate about reddit and discord is that you only get exposed to "current" threads or "top" threads. On old forums everything was just there and if someone commented on it, it came back to the top and re-ignited conversations.
I was a big user of the command and conquer forums and I definitely miss the community of it. But that may just be the scale of Internet then compared to now. Back then you saw the same users every day and we ended up chatting on msn and working on projects together. I couldn't tell you any users on my instance or elsewhere other than the admins of my instance.
