Hello folks! I’ve just written a pretty massive comment on what exactly happened during our update to Lemmy 0.19.0 - to make a long story short, both of my “legacy” servers, so to speak, are quickly starting to fall apart at the seams and I’m having a hard time trying to figure out why that is.

Given that it took me over 24 hours just to complete the update (and revive the instance during that process as the update failed on the first attempt), it doesn’t seem like this server is going to hold out for much longer. Given the expense that both of these systems cost every month (about $130 or so), I do not think its worth keeping them around for much longer.

Now that The Outpost is on Lemmy 0.19.0, you can export your profile settings from the settings page which will export your subscriptions, profile metadata (your “about me” and such), and any blocked users/communities. Unfortunately it does not export posts/comments, which I suspect is more of a limitation of how the ActivityPub protocol (the protocol Lemmy is built off of, and is what allows Federation to occur) works. Technically speaking, I suppose you could pull it off, but upon import all posts/comments would be created at the exact same time.

So, The Outpost will be officially decommissioned at the start of February (on the 5th, plus/minus a day or two), so that everyone here has throughout December and January to perform the export, account deletions (if wanted - this will remove your comments and posts from your profile throughout the Fediverse, should you not delete your account, those will all remain with the exception of any images that were uploaded directly from here - so that choice is up to you), along with finding a new instance that suits you. As previously mentioned, myself and Myth are running a new Lemmy instance known as The BitForged Space and you are more than welcome to join there! If not however, there are tons of Lemmy instances - some of them small like we are, and some of them magnitudes larger.

I wish we hadn’t hit this fork in the road, but unfortunately it just makes more sense to rebuild things from the ground up, as the saying goes “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it”. Until then, hopefully as long as I don’t attempt to perform any more upgrades, things will continue to work until that point. You’re welcome to continue using The Outpost, but I urge you to not wait till the last day just in case any issues do come up.

I thank everyone who has been here to join us on our adventure through the Fediverse, and I hope to continue to see you all out there - whether that’s over at The BitForged Space, or another instance, that is the beauty of the Fediverse, we continue to march on! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to let me know.

- Russ