I did a search for communities with “history” in the name. It came back with !history@links.hackliberty.org even though that instance has been down for over a year. If I did not already know of that instance going down, I would just post there expecting my post to be seen, because there is no indicator of when the server was last up.
If your instance federated with the community before it went down there will be a local copy available. The same thing happened with me with !lefthanded@wayfarershaven.eu
Maybe what we need is an “inactive” value that apps/ front ends can use to display communities that haven’t seen activity recently. Maybe any posts or comments in the past 3 months?
That wouldn’t exactly hit the mark because a ghost community /can/ be active. The problem is that if you have:
- someCommunity@originalNode
- nodeA/someCommunity@originalNode
- nodeB/someCommunity@originalNode
You can see the local copy of nodeA/someCommunity@originalNode if you are on nodeA. But you don’t know it is orphaned and you are in a bubble. People on nodeB can see posts in nodeB/someCommunity@originalNode, but not nodeA/someCommunity@originalNode. There is no signal that you have been cut off, and that your post will only have a local audience.
We already have transparency of activity, but not transparency of scope and reach.
I would even say adding the transparency is just a start. The real bug here is that the fedi has not figured out that nodeA and nodeB need to sync with each other regardless of the parent.
