Comment on MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT: WG is shutting down as a public instance March 1st 2025.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 month ago
What were the problem-causing changes that were made to the test instance before it starting hosting users? Code changes / DB migrations that were then hard to undo?
It might serve as a useful cautionary tale for other admins, to know the specifics so people know how to avoid painting themselves into the same corner.
FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyz 1 month ago
Early on we were experimenting with trying to offer everything on the fediverse from a Lemmy instance. A lot of changes and tweaks were made to try to make that work before it was abandoned. There’s a lot of leftover bloat from that project that we’ve been trying to deal with without too much impact to the Lemmy instance but for the size of the instance it makes more sense to start over than to spend even more time trying to undo the wrongs of the past. There isn’t a specific cautionary tale here besides “don’t go public with things that you hope to fix later.”
More recently we’ve had issues with our registrar or DNS pop up that no one seems to have answers for yet, so sometimes the domain itself isn’t reachable. One problem or the other might not be a huge deal in the short term but together they make for a miserable time trying to sort things out. Moving the traffic to a known good config will help me maintain sanity while dealing with the issues at WG.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 month ago
Makes sense. Meaning code changes to the Lemmy server? Additional scripting added in that would take work to remove if you want things to keep working? Federations out in ways that weren’t compatible with Lemmy and are now written into someone else’s DB and unchangeable?
I’m just curious about the details, I like to hack on my little toybox Lemmy server as well is why I am asking these things. You’re welcome to go into as much detail as you have time for, if you feel like.