What’s happening?
feddit.uk will be down for maintainence between 19:00 and 21:00 UTC (GMT in old money) on Saturday the 27th of January.
We are aiming to move the site between hosts, and restore missing images.
How long do you expect it to take?
The target time is 1 hour. The window is 2 hours. That’s enough time for about 1 season of Peep Show, if you’re bored.
What is the rollback plan?
If we’re not happy with things by 20:30, we will bring the site up in it’s previous state, and schedule a longer window in the future. We’ll let you know if/when the decision is made.
Where can I see status updates?
We have a public channel on Matrix for people who wish to keep up with the status. It’s part of the feddit.uk Matrix space which is there as a fallback in case of any downtime and to provide end-to-end encrypted communication where required.
edit: there is now a WhatsApp channel.
Why are you doing this?
As previously discussed in here, it’s been quite the journey but, in summary: Tom, who set up the instance and was the only Admin, went AWOL. GreatAlbatross and I contacted him offering to take over and Tom made us Admins but we didn’t have any access to the server, so we were limited in what we could do.
The situation got increasingly problematic and plans were drawn up to take over the whole running of the site or to start a new one from scratch. It took a while but just as we were about to pull the trigger on the new instance Tom gave us access. GA is now in charge of the domain and I have overall responsibility for the new server.
The site has been suffering outages because the size of the image folders ate up all the available space and Tom removed the first image folder (why various graphics are still missing). That made moving the site to a new hosting plan more urgent and we’ve been working away in the background to get to the point that we were in a position to start the process. Hence the downtime.
We’d like to thank everyone for their patience and enthusiasm - it has helped carry us through what hasn’t been a straightforward process.
I have more questions
There will be more information after the move about how we are going to move forward with feddit.uk to ensure it will thrive for as long as people want it. However, if there’s anything that is unclear about current events then fire away in the comments below.
i will be truthful, i had lost complete confidence in the instance after seeing the crashes back in december. i had moved to using lemmy anonymously since then, to “wait and see” if i had to setup an account elsewhere.
seeing this though? full confidence restored. 👍
i am glad there is now more than one single point of failure. i hope that this adventure becomes a valuable lesson to other instances that have just one admin running everything. if you’re reading this, and your instance has one admin - you need to fix that, yesterday!
once you have an OpenCollective or something like it setup, i will be able to contribute. make sure to let us know when a fresh donation link is up (because i don’t trust the old ko-fi link in the sidebar)
thank you so much for your hard work. ❤️
And thanks for your kind words.
And that was a definite concern for us and other Lemmy instance Admins.
Going forward feddit.uk is going to be future-proofed so it can survive and thrive. It’s now everyone’s site, the Admins are just running it for you. So it’s not just a change in getting to the point where the site can survive the loss of an Admin, it’s a change in… philosophy.
Yes the Ko-fi link will go once we are 100% confident we don’t need access to the old server and so we are only using our own resources. I’ll get in the case with researching Open Collective so we can use the momentum of the changes to ensure the finances are solid.