Hello everyone! Today marks the step in the new evolution of The Outpost, which is now becoming The BitForged Space.

It has been decided to start The BitForged Space off with a clean slate, instead of migrating The Outpost’s data. One important reason for the change was to move our instance over to a new domain (without using a subdomain), which unfortunately due to how ActivityPub, the underlying protocol of Lemmy, doesn’t really allow for domain changes since users and identities of communities are intrinsically tied to the domain name. Is it theoretically possible to migrate? Maybe, but due to the “hacks” that would be required, it’s likely to only cause more issues than its worth, and would defeat the whole purpose of a clean-slate anyways.

Given that The Outpost isn’t a massive instance by any means (and if I’m being completely honest, aside from myself, I think pretty much everyone else has left), I figured it wouldn’t make that much of an impact. I’m not surprised, given that The Outpost has encountered a lot of issues due to just the hardware constraints of the system that it runs on.

You can find out more about our migration to The BitForged Space, over at it’s announcement post.

For now, The Outpost will continue to run - however, it will eventually be decommissioned officially, and depending on how things turn out, I might not be able to provide much advance warning when that happens - so this post will serve as the official warning. The Outpost will not receive much maintenance in terms of quality-of-service improvements, however I am willing to at the very least update The Outpost to Lemmy 0.19 once that update is released since it will include profile data imports/exports as part of it.

If you are still using an account on The Outpost, I’d appreciate it if you could give a shout here indicating so, that way I can push for going forward with that update when that time comes. For security and privacy reasons, I do not keep activity logs for all that long - they are kept for 24 hours and then flushed out (and IP addresses don’t even get included). Realistically, the only reason anything is logged at all is for debugging if say, Federation does stop working.

In the meantime, registrations at The Outpost has been closed, and communities can no longer be created. It’s not in a completely read-only mode, as you’ll still be able to make posts and comments to remote communities (and federation will continue to work) - but I’d recommend moving when its convenient for you.

After the decommission date passes for The Outpost, all data will be permanently deleted - however, due to the way federation works, if you want your posts and comments removed from other instances, it’s heavily recommended to delete your account from here at The Outpost via your account settings. That’ll trigger a delete request to all communities that you’ve posted to, as otherwise your posts/comments will still be visible there. This does mean that whether you want your comments/posts to live on is fully up to you, if you do want them to live on - then do not delete your account. If you want them to disappear, then do proceed to deleting your account.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me - I can still be contacted over Matrix, or you can send me a DM to my new account at over at @russjr08@bitforged.space (please avoid DM’ing my account here as it’ll result in a delayed response).

I appreciate everyone who has participated in our home here at The Outpost, and I hope that you’ll join us over at The BitForged Space however if you choose not to do so, there’s no hard feelings at all!

I look forward to seeing you all here on the Fediverse, no matter where you choose to make your new home! For now, this is The Outpost team signing off, to turn to the next chapter.