What happened to julialang.social mastodon? it’s out!
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There was a problem with the registration of the domain I believe, @avik may know more. In any case the instance was supposed to be shut down in a few weeks.
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It kind a hit me by surprise that the domain was down. Was it anounced somewhere that it will shut down?
If I knew I would have moved my account to another mastodon instance but now this doesn’t work, which is somewhat sad.
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It was announced on Slack (so I heard) rather than on Mastodon. But it went offline suddenly rather than being closed down slowly.
Although I posted a lot, and boosted a lot, I sometimes wonder how much any of this social media really matters 
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There were also a lot of posts. I think it’s bad that there was little publicity about the closure, if there was any notice elsewhere. On the network itself, they could have given a notice with a date to give us time to migrate to another server. Ok, it’s done!
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Ah okay, I don’t use the Julia Slack channel (or any other Slack). Funny that they close it down without announcing it on Mastodon, but many instances closed or will close down soon.
I also had a healthy network and kind a sad that there was no chance to migrate to another server in time.
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I had announced on Slack a couple of months ago that the instance will be shut down due to lack of maintainance. There was some feedback on slack about a wider set of announcements, which I was meaning to do. However, a week ago, we lost the DNS entries for the site. I’ve been trying to figure out what happened, and been unable to. I do not have access to the domain records (as I said – lack of maintainance 
).
So yeah, while a shutdown was on the cards, it certainly wasn’t meant to be this sudden. Sorry. I’m still trying to figure out what happened, so there is chance it’ll come back, but honestly, I’ve not made much headway. I personally do not use that instance, and was just trying to make a graceful shutdown, but apparently fate had other plans 
.
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I understand that gone really means gone in the fediverse and that’s there’s no way to migrate from the now shut-down server to another instance, right?
I’m starting to like Bluesky, but since Mastodon remains the only decentralized option, I’d like to keep my handle just in case
Isn’t Bluesky decentralized too?
Not really: How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
It’s a long post, but well worth the read
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A proper bulletin board should also be on a blockchain like ledger. Otherwise the history has a tendency to change (or get expunged).
Though Mastodon is decentralized, it is best to have an account on an instance that is run by reputable organization (e.g. a nonprofit) that can make a credible long-term maintenance commitment. e.g. the default instance mastodon.social.
It’s analogous to the difference between the discourse software and a particular discourse server — just because the software is open source doesn’t mean any particular server is reliable. (It seems a little crazy that people join instances maintained by some random person.)
If julialang is going to maintain promotional social-media accounts, they should consider just getting an account on a reputable Mastodon server like mastodon.social. Alternatively, use one of the emerging “bridge” systems to mirror their bluesky account on mastodon … but the problem is that the existing bridges seem to be personal projects that you can’t rely on long-term. Ideally this would be more automated — Bluesky would actually federate — but Bluesky is at its core a proprietary site that seems likely to trap users and eventually enshittify, so I’m not holding my breath for them to embrace interop.
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