Unfortunately, the popular MedMastodon server, dedicated to doctors and medicine, unexpectedly shut down at the end of 2025.

The speed with which it happened prevented users from accessing their data, highlighting the risks of decentralized social media without backups. Its administrator ceased operations, causing confusion and data loss for many healthcare professionals who had signed up as an alternative to Twitter.

This event serves as a reminder: Wherever you are on Mastodon, back up your data!

WARNING: To help Med-mastodon users who have returned to the Fediverse, the Poliverso staff has created the Friendica group @medmastodon

If you follow this group, you can:

1. Follow it and mention it in your messages, and it will reshare all your public posts addressed to it (this only applies to an initial message, not a reply to another message).
2. Follow it only to read all the messages from fellow doctors who send messages through it.

#MedMastodon

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Comments

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chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
If Mastodon is federated, why isn’t this recoverable somehow? I thought federation involved making copies of content on other servers, does that just not happen often enough for it to work as a backup?

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- Pamasich@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  ActivityPub (the model that the fediverse uses for federation) is publishing-based, as the name implies. Like email, you're sending messages to a list of recipients. Usually that's your followers, people you mention, and the person you're replying to.
  If the recipient list is empty, then your message won't leave your instance.
  
  Threadiverse users don't really have to worry about this too much because communities act as relays, sending your posts to all of the community's followers as well. But microblogging instances don't have that luxury. If they don't have any followers, aren't writing a reply, and don't mention anyone... their post isn't federated anywhere.
  
  It's also worth considering that only public data is federated. For example I wouldn't be able to recover my bookmarks from another instance, and it doesn't seem like Lemmy federates your list of subscriptions. Your posts may still exist elsewhere even when your instance goes down, but that's not necessarily the data people want to be able to recover.
  
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  - chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Things like subscriptions don’t seem like they should take up too much space, so it seems like a flaw that there isn’t more redundancy
    
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- nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Some content are just cached on other server, but not all data like credentials or full content.
  
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Ascendor@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Are there any best practices for backing up Mastodon accounts/data?

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umbraroze@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

Wherever you are on Mastodon, back up your data!

Dear lazyweb (or lazystodon or lazyverse), are there dead simple scripts for periodic backup? You know, something you just authorise to act as a client and then stick into a crontab to run daily/weekly and it’ll keep a local copy of your stuff. Preferably something you can just install via pip or gem or (oh please gods no) npm.

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other_cat@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I’m not sure what people would be trying to access, I suppose. Post history? Things that can be exported, like account settings, generally should be stashed somewhere. Things that can’t be, well… That’s a bit sad but I dunno, I never post anything online that I care so much about I’d be sad if it disappeared. Anything I did care about, I make a backup of it locally.

Not trying to downplay people’s upset, but just pointing out ways to protect the things you care about.

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Auster@thebrainbin.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
@piratepost if it's on poliverso, then users from the "threadiverse" should be able to find it with !medmastodon. And iirc, communities/magazines/groups/channels on Mastodon can be treated as both hashtags, and as users, e.g. @medmastodon.

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