Godspeed Joindiaspora

Joindiaspora.com as a fully-functioning Diaspora* pod is no more. It was the first, and possibly largest node on the federated Diaspora* network, both factors of which contributed in part to its demise as detailed by its administrators and the Diaspora* developers team.

It will have some limited continued existence, see below and links for details.

At 20:01 UTC the site started throwing 502 Bad Gateway errors. This means that the planned maintenance has begun. According to previous announcements (see below), the site will return in a "limited-service mode" at some future point, precise time not known. How long the site will remain available in this mode has also not been clear, though suggestions are that it will be at least a month. I would hope longer.

On Friday, March 4th, at around 20:00 UTC, JoinDiaspora will go down for a long maintenance break. We cannot yet estimate how long this will take. We will use that time to move JoinDiaspora and its data from infrastructure maintained by Feneas to infrastructure maintained by the diaspora* Core Team. This work will not resolve existing issues with exporting account data. Our work on the export feature will start at a later time, see below.

When maintenance is completed, JoinDiaspora will be available again in a limited-service mode. In this mode, you will no longer be able to read or write posts or comments. However, you will be able to manage your account, and you will be able to export your account data.

-- An update on the future of JoinDiaspora.com 2022-2-22

As has been typical of the shutdown, there was no final announcement that I'm aware. The #Joindiaspora hashtag has a few recent posts from members, though none from Podmins, and the announcement posts lacked any hashtags --- the only real searchable Diaspora* mechanism --- at all. Communications could have been much better than they were. I'll be discussing this and other matters in future.

There has been an update at the Joindiaspora Sunset Team profile:

As announced in our announcement, the server migration is currently underway. Given the size of JoinDiaspora's filesystem and database, this might take a couple of hours to complete.

https://pod.diaspora.software/posts/5009540

I strongly recommend monitoring that profile for further announcements:

Profile: @The JoinDiaspora Sunset Team (joindiaspora-sunset@pod.diaspora.software)
URL: https://pod.diaspora.software/u/joindiaspora-sunset

I do want to thank Lukas Matt and others for their time and effort all the same. Joindiaspora, like the Diaspora* project itself, has been a volunteer and amateur effort, in the original sense of that last word, performed for love not lucre.

Status of my Joindiaspora content

I've taken pains to see that my own content from my Joindiaspora profile, @Doc Edward Morbius (moved to Glasswings), remains as generally available as possible. Specifically:

I've requested several data exports, the most recent of which created yesterday. I've engaged minimally on the platform in the past two months, since the shutdown was initially announced.
As many posts as possible have been federated to Glasswings, and hopefully other pods, as possible.
My earliest remote followers came from the following pods and dates, which should provide the most complete set of federated posts with comments: pod.orkz (25 December 2013), pod.geraspora.de (18 January 2014), diasp.eu (31 March, 2014), diasp.de (6 May, 2014), diaspora-fr.org (22 July, 2014), spyurk.am (11 August, 2014).
Glasswings (diaspora.glasswings.com), my new home, seems to have begun federating between mid-April and mid-May, 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic ramped up and I posted on that topic. Earlier posts may be present (mostly by recent federation triggered by me) but the comments date from the first federation event. Yes, Diaspora* federation is ... complicated.
WIth few exceptions, any still-extant content should be available under at least its joindiaspora.com original URL at Archive.Today, including full comments. This includes both my own original posts and reshares.
I've made multiple attempts to save posts to the Internet Archive. This is nominally easier as it may be automated. It does not preserve comments. In practice, I've found over the past several months that automated submissions via the Archive's own supported methods do not succeed consistently. I don't know how successful those efforts have been yet, I do plan on assessing this in future. The Archive is useful in that many people and tools will consult it automatically for links which have expired. Archive.Today does not yet have a similar recognition.
I do NOT plan to delete my Joindiaspora profile, as that would have the effect of deleting all my content, including federated content. This has been an issue I've observed from others' deleted profiles as I've attempted my own data salvage operation.

I've also created, and am continuing to refine, tools which work on the downloaded data extract and which provide both local access to that content and can create formats and exports which are useful in referring to older content. In particular, an "Archive Index" generator, which summarizes the content and provides links which should in theory point to extant copies still on line. Again, that's ongoing work, though I've published draft versions. Those tools, incidentally, assisted greatly in manually archiving and federating most of my 2,659 posts and reshares over the past two months. Tedious, but in my case, largely tractable. I'll be posting a curated set of public indices highlighting more significant content in future.

I write much of this in the hopes that it will be useful to others, most especially members of other pods either presently annoucing shutdown plans (#Pluspora most notably) or which do so in future.

Godspeed Joindiaspora

Status of my Joindiaspora content

See also: