Is it possible or does it present difficulties with federation?
I’m asking because today Vlemmy seems dead and people are speculating it has something to do with losing the domain name. So I want to know if there is a possibility the same server could come up again under a different domain but keeping the same accounts and content stored or if they will need to set up a new server and thus it’s just better to move on to another instance.
Not sure…
With matrix, which is also federated, this cannot be done. In any way. At all.
You could attempt editing the database directly, but this is a bad, superbad, idea.
This is because the domain of the original server was part of the usernames and chat room names, and all of that would be in the database, for the server, and other servers, to know what goes together with what.
If you change your domain, your server wont know who the users logging in with the new domain are. Other servers wont know who they are, or what chat rooms they should be in.
I imagine it’s much the same with the fediverse. Changing your domain would break everything, where the databases are concerned.
And even if you could edit your database to swap out all mentions of the old domain, you could never do so for all other servers out there with federation database entries for your old domain.
Alright everyone… First we are going to find your hosts file…
You’re saying matrix stores channel name as name + instance even for local channels? That it’s not using standard practice of denormalizing data?
What you see in the frontend or API isn’t necessarily how it’s stored.
*Normalising
Denormalising is the other way around, ie accepting duplicated or less than optimally organised data for some other reason (eg for performance or to reduce complexity for your filthy human brain - but usually performance)
Sorry I know that’s a very minor nitpick.
It’s not that minor. Thank you for the correction. :)
Data normalization has nothing to do with it.
All Matrix channels are a channel name and a domain. That’s a unique identifier. You need unique identifiers. Matrix is not designed to exist in an vacuum (even if you can make it work that way). Locality is dictated by policy not by the data model.
huh, didn’t realise vlemmy went down.
Absolutely. It should be trivially easy for the owner to get a new name and point it at the server if it still exists and is working. However, I understand that we know very few facts about the situation.
Don’t let that discourage you from having accounts on other instances. One shouldn’t get too tied to a specific one IMHO.
EDIT: Should be. Not sure what happens with usernames.
I’m not so sure.
The reason the domain is part of our usernames, is so that there can’t be two users with exactly the same name.
If a server could change its domain name after initial setup, that would break.
? But when interacting with local content your name ha sno server associated with it, so the server info is only present for federated content.
Bringing the old server back up configured with a new name could… Maybe send out duplicate content with the new name? Idk enough about activitypub yet.
