We were reminded recently of the XKCD comic 686: Admin Mourning.

That single comic is profound in its own right, as the loss of a single being matters.

But this got us thinking about what it means when an entire fediverse instance goes offline for good 🥺😔

In the 3 years since we abandoned the sinking ship of mastodon dot lol, we alone have made over 30 thousand posts on our current instance.

If we ever were to migrate elsewhere, we could not take those posts, or any of the media, with us.

But that alone doesn't convey the whole story.

We've interacted with so many people, and our posts have been seen and shared by so many other beings.

We've made so many friends and got to know and befriend so many folks, even if we've increasingly struggled to keep in touch with most of them.

If this instance ever ceases to be, even if somebody archives the entire server somehow, it won't just be the links to posts that will go dead: it'll be so much deeper.

English has the word nostalgia to describe the intense, bittersweet pain of wanting to return to a home or familiar surroundings, though it has gradually taken on the additional meaning of being a place or time that you cannot return to.

From what we understand, old Welsh has a similar but stronger word -- hireath -- which roughly translates as an intense yearning or longer for a past or home that specifically no longer exists and which you can never return to.

That reminds us of Gollum's Song (performed by Emilíana Torrini) from the end of The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers, particularly the lyrics:

You are lost

You can never go home

Maybe a being or entity dies when they are forgotten, but an instance can die when it goes permanently offline without backups or archives.

We guess it's an uncomfortable reminder that nothing and nobody will last forever.

#fedi #fediverse #Mastodon #existential #transience #ephemerality #InstanceShutdown

RE: https://greifswald.lgbt/@alxhu/116318633541360150

mastodon.lgbt has been closed today

#instanceshutdown #mastoadmin #mastodon

RE: https://mastodon.lgbt/@mastodonlgbt/116318629726348167

I will shut down mastodon.lgbt in about two weeks.

This instance (greifswald.lgbt) is NOT affected.

#instanceshutdown #mastoadmin #mastodon

Well, I've reached the limit of what my cached @noodlemaz profile on mastodon.social will show me in terms of follows - so now I gotta start from scratch.

Please do drop me a toot if I followed you before and should again!! Though how you'll see this, I've no idea.
#medMastodon #instanceShutdown

🚨 Just a heads-up: there's only 1 month left until gainer.cloud shuts down on August 1st, 2025.

Thanks to everyone who joined and made the instance what it was. It's been a ride, but all things come to an end. Make sure to back up your data and migrate if you haven’t already.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. 💬

#Mastodon #Fediverse #InstanceShutdown #GainerCloud

I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but Aethy.com is temporarily down because their storage operators “dropped the ball” (according to them) and they “chose to shut it down rather than the site operating in a degraded state.”
If you have a problem with my wording, it’s not mine—it’s the instance owners.

#aethynews #aethy #aethyDOTcom #instance #instanceshutdown #shutdown #aethywillbeback