Fediverse servers do sometimes decide to close permanently for a variety of reasons. However, all of the servers listed at JoinMastodon.org ⧉ and Fedi.Garden ⧉ have promised to give at least three months notice if they are going to close down. This gives the server’s members lots of time to transfer their accounts to other servers.
As long as you transfer your account before the server shuts down, you can keep your existing followers, follows, bookmarks, lists, filters, mutes and blocks when you move to another server. This is why it’s so crucial to be on a server that promises to give warning if it is shutting down, so that you have time to transfer your account to another server.
What do I do if my server is closing down?
- Go to Fedi.Garden ⧉ or JoinMastodon.org ⧉ and choose a new server that suits you, sign up for a new account.
- Follow the instructions on the account transfer guide so you can transfer your old account to your new account.
- If you have any links to your account outside the Fediverse (for example on your personal website), remember to update them to show your new account.
How do I avoid being on a server that closes down suddenly?
Your best option is to choose a server listed on Fedi.Garden ⧉ or JoinMastodon.org ⧉ as all the listed servers have promised to give three months warning if they intend to shut down.
You might also want to check out the list of reliable servers sorted by date of founding ⧉, as longer-running servers have a more proven track record.
How do I know if my server has promised to give three months warning if it ever shuts down?
If you’re unsure, ask your server’s admin. They may also have info about this on your server’s website‘s “About” page.
Do servers shut down because they’re small?
No. You cannot tell how reliable a server is based on its size. They aren’t businesses, none of the servers are profit-making, so there is no need for them to be big to survive. If you look at the list of reliable servers by date of founding ⧉ you will see small and medium servers that have been online since 2017.
Any online service of any size may shut down one day, even really huge services used by hundreds of millions of people ⧉, and those that keep going may not be quite the same ⧉. If an online service is centralised, which almost all commercial services are, then when it closes you lose your account and everything in it, no matter how huge and immortal the service might seem.
Mastodon and the Fediverse aren’t centralised. They are federated, which means you aren’t trapped if a server decides to shut down. If a server on a federated network says it is going to close, you can transfer your account to another server and keep your account alive. You can even set up your own server if you want to.
What if a server goes down just temporarily? What happens to posts or messages that are being sent to it while it is down?
Short answer: Temporary breakdowns are not a problem.
Longer answer: If your server breaks down for a few days and other servers can’t get through to it, the other servers will wait and then try again later, and keep retrying (up to a certain limit set by the other server). When your server goes back online, it will start to automatically catch up on all the posts and messages it has missed.
Messages and posts do not get lost because a server goes down temporarily, they just go in a queue for resending later. This is similar to the process used by email servers when they go down temporarily.