The community was deleted by the creator. I had to restore it via the database but it seems to have worked and the community is visible again on other instances too. It can take a few tries to open that community if you are on another instance as it has to be federated again first.
We also need a new moderator team for that community. So anyone interested, point us to some of the posts you did in that community and we’ll have a look!
This episode has made it clear Lemmy software needs to improve in several ways to be resiliant to the problem. The possible #LemmyBug/enhancements:
① the fix was apparently not just flipping a switch— it required hacking the db, correct? Shouldn’t admins have a simple undelete button?
② what if a rogue admin had deleted the community, and perhaps even destroyed the db? In principle it should be possible to rebuild the community on a different node using data from all nodes that have data. Sometimes a whole node goes down. The plug gets pulled when funds run out. We are hosed when that happens.
③ each user’s subscriptions panel should not simply quietly cease to list the deleted community. The community name should remain and have indicators to signal issues (e.g. 💀, ⚠).
④ msgs users write are stored in their profile & responses are stored in their inbox. But this is poor organization on its own. It only serves to quickly see new msgs/reactions, but users are overly dependent on the server’s representation of the community to show threads in a coherent way. Clients should have that capability too. I should be able to click “context” on any msg and the client should be able to show me a sequence of msgs regardless of the state of the server host.
I had to manually change a flag in the database to restore the community. There was no option from the UI to do a “restore” like you normally can. The user also deleted his account after maybe that is why.
Either way, what happened here can happen anywhere. And while there is always talks about “spreading the loading because it is good for the fediverse” it also shows what can happen if an instance’s admin(s) becomes inactive for whatever reason. We have lemmy.one and feddit.uk now who’s admins seem to have disappeared. Your community and accounts can be gone overnight.
We as admins still can see the posts and reactions. So that’s a good thing. But it seems we cannot open it up to the other users without having much federation issues. We will look into this, but we need some more time. I will get back to you!
yeah it was tricky because the community name was overwritten with “[email protected]”. I was only able to rediscover what the original community address was by some strange anomaly of like an autocomplete in a search field or something. The existence of the community is scrubbed even on lemmyverse.net.
(edit) And my subscription was quietly removed. What should have happened is the subscription link in my subscription list should have remained as text (not as a hyperlink). It should have gotten a strikethrough with a “💀” next to it. That’s another #LemmyBug for the pile.
Correction-- I was just able to trace back to see how I figured out what the community address was. When I mouse-over “[email protected]” on an old post of my own to the deleted community (from my profile), the underlying link is: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/[email protected]. So I think it’s only because I am not on lemmy.world myself that this was revealed. I suspect when users are on the same instance where the deletion happened, the original name may not appear. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
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