Federation is eventually consistent, but when we're talking practical terms, how long is too long for a node to be offline?

I suffered a bit of a data loss and while I was able to recover my mastodon instance within 2 days, lemmy took me a week and I don't see anyone spamming the inboxes again.

Should I expect that other servers effectively defederated me and should I resubscribe to my communities or I should give it a few days?

I finally got to cleaning up the metrics in my homelab and researched the means to separate my long-term and short-term data. This way you can scrape all kinds of noisy sources (e.g. kubernetes) while having a separate store for things you want to observe on longer time windows (months and years). The best thing? It's transparent for grafana and the like, so you can keep all your dashboards intact.

I moved off a Synology NAS to a self-managed machine and one thing I still struggle to replace is something like a synology drive. Here are my requirements:

• server side store data in a plain FS (I want transparency)
• client side (windows), it must support VFS (download files when needed, support offloading of large files)
• having snapshots of data is a must

I have a 40gbit uplink to my desktop, so if everything else fails I’ll just use samba with zfs snapshots exposed to VSS, but we’re talking some large files still (think several hundreds of MBs) and I’m not sure Blender will be happy working off a network disk.

I’ve been pointed to next/own-cloud previously, but they don’t seem to cover my use case, I think. Should I actually try one of those? I browsed around owncloud's storage bit (which is written in go), and it seems mostly fitting, but I’ve been told I should steer away from ownCloud towards nextCloud.

I’m reading the ActivityPub spec here and it seems pretty fit for client-to-server communications. Yeah, it might be somewhat bulkier than your typical rest api, but it's more universal, which begs the question: why do mastodon and lemmy both decided to implement custom (and incompatible) APIs for their clients to talk to the servers? Wouldn’t it be more straightforward if e.g. my voyager app talked ActivityPub to lemmy.world which then talked ActivityPub to lemmy.ml or something.

What am I missing?

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I wasn't sure how to find the communities I'm interested in, so I quickly hacked together a scraper that makes a list of all the communities(1) of all the servers mine is federating to(2).

You can find it (with a very trivial UI) at directory.fstab.sh. Hover over the link to see the description. Use the search bar to search by text.

Is this something useful or there was a better way to do the same?

• (1) it does its best to scrape them all but incidents might happen
• (2) updated nightly

Is there any way to see the “all” stream from another instance (pretty much what wefwef does for lemmy.world when there's no account) when I’m logged into my instance?