3d ago

Question, basic: How to follow moving instances (topics)? And what happens to "old" instances?

Hello, dear "Lemmings" (correct address?)

As a quite new user to the Lemmy universe and the Fediverse concept, I have a basic question, which I could not get answered elsewhere: If an instance (= a community / topic group, e. g. "memes","World news" or "MapPorn" in the example picture) is moving from one server to another (= the name and/or ending changes), how to properly follow the move? And what happens to the "old" instances, that are discontinued? Should I keep them following?

Best regards

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3 comments

If an instance (= a topic group, e. g. “memes”,“World news” or “MapPorn” in the example picture) is moving from one server to another (= the name and/or ending changes), how to properly follow the move?
You find out about it the way you did, then follow the new one. I don't think there's a mechanism to do that automatically.
And what happens to the “old” instances, that are discontinued? Should I keep the following?
In this particular case, you can see in the sidebar that the community is locked, i.e. there will not be any new posts, i.e. there is no point in keeping the subscription. It also doesn't hurt anything though.
- Thanks for the answers, @schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de! Because I access the communities from lemmy.ml, I was not sure if it easily will work with other instaces if I just use the link and subscribe. And I thought there might be a feature - that I miss - which automatically integrates the old and new contents.
  And yes, I have seen the "locked" label. Still you could subscribe and read the content. That's what's confusing me. - If I don't subscribe anymore, I will still find old topics by the search, right? So some question still remain, and it would be nice if people could answer what will happen to outdated communities/instances. - I guess they will stay online as long as their host servers are online? So in the future, we might have several communities with the same name, some "dead" some active?
  
  I have brought this up before with my instance admins, that there were communities in the search results whose hosting instances were no longer up. They told me that there was no good way to do anything about this, the only thing they could do is defederate from those instances but that would delete old threads.
  https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/35829576