Fediverse servers do sometimes decide to close 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. The transfer process lets people keep their followers, follows, blocks etc.
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.
- Follow the instructions on the account transfer guide
- If you have any links to your account outside the Fediverse, remember to update them to 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.
Do servers shut down because they’re small?
No.
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?
If a server breaks down temporarily and other servers can’t get through to it, the other servers will wait a while and try to communicate with it again when some time has passed. When the server goes back online, it will start to automatically catch up on the posts and messages it has missed.
Messages and posts do not get lost because a server goes down, they just go in a queue for resending later.
(This is the same process used by email servers, they will also wait and retry later if an email doesn’t get through straight away.)