Unfortunately, the popular MedMastodon server, dedicated to doctors and medicine, unexpectedly shut down at the end of 2025.
The speed with which it happened prevented users from accessing their data, highlighting the risks of decentralized social media without backups. Its administrator ceased operations, causing confusion and data loss for many healthcare professionals who had signed up as an alternative to Twitter.
This event serves as a reminder: Wherever you are on Mastodon, back up your data!
WARNING: To help Med-mastodon users who have returned to the Fediverse, the Poliverso staff has created the Friendica group @medmastodon
If you follow this group, you can:
- Follow it and mention it in your messages, and it will reshare all your public posts addressed to it (this only applies to an initial message, not a reply to another message).
- Follow it only to read all the messages from fellow doctors who send messages through it.
The speed with which what happened? I can’t even open that image…
[Edit: PieFed did not show the title including the link to Reddit where additional information was provided.]
It reads like an instance by the name of MedMastodon went down with little to no notice.
Although this announcement seems to have been made on a Friendica instance that also isn’t cooperating (edit: hashtags) - certainly not to anyone without a login on that specific instance, which I imagine will affect roughly 100.00000% of all people reading this (and high ironically - in the Alanis Morissette sense - roughly also 100.00000% of the people that do not read this:-).
To anyone on Lemmy and wondering, there are additional hashtags that render on PieFed but not Lemmy, though it doesn’t help here since this is the only place that hashtag has ever been used (that PieFed here shows).
Oh, and the instance actually does return an error page saying “This instance is under maintenance.”,
so it’s remotely possible that this Friendica message is based on misinformation, and that the instance being “down” may be only temporary? (I have no idea)Some additional info I could scrounge:
Article about Med-Mastodon, basically saying to use both the X and then treat that Mastodon as a way to hedge your bets against Twitter enshittifying.
Hrm, it looks like their GoFundMe may have just run out, having started on Nov. 15, 2022 and lasting for 3 years? (I have no idea if there were any follow-up ones)
And at this point I’ve already put far more work into this than OP, it would seem, trying to guess what they meant, so I’ll stop here.🙄(edit: this was due to a PieFed rendering bug)Oh, and the instance actually does return an error page saying “This instance is under maintenance.”, so it’s remotely possible that this Friendica message is based on misinformation, and that the instance being “down” may be only temporary? (I have no idea)
For some reason Piefed is removing the title of the post, which links to a Reddit thread as a source. That thread clarifies: “I emailed the address given on the page and was told the instance service was cancelled by the instance owner and it’s unknown whether there was a plan to migrate or just shut down completely”.
Looking at the under maintenance page myself, the email seems to be the server host’s, so this isn’t the instance owner being unsure about their future plans yet, it means the hosting relationship is cancelled and the host doesn’t know about things beyond that.
Thank you for the correction and additional information.
@rimu@piefed.social a bug report: Piefed is removing the title of the post, which profoundly affects its understandability.
Haha friendica puts the post title and link IN the post content as HTML!
<h1><b><a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/1pxtglg/my_instance_went_dark_is_there_any_possibility_of//" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Unfortunately, the popular MedMastodon server, dedicated to doctors and medicine, unexpectedly shut down at the end of 2025.</a></b></h1>sigh
@OpenStars@piefed.social I’ve written a fix for this, so Friendica posts like that will be rendered better.
So quick, that’s fantastic! 🤩
It’s not released yet, this fix will come out with v1.5.
I’m probably going to switch to making smaller releases from now on (one big monster every 4-6 weeks contains too many changes for people to really absorb and understand) so 1.5 might be sooner than you expect.
@piratepost@poliverso.org that’s wonderful! And as Rimu mentioned the PieFed software will be fixed in the next release to help facilitate future cross-platform communications, this has been a very encouraging post!:-)
If it went down exactly on new year, then they probably just let some kind of payment run out like hosting or DNS.
Yeah nothing is loading
This is the fediverse, where many different software intersect. You should expect the possibility of incompatibilities with users from instances other than your own. When a post looks like something is missing, always open it on its origin instance before complaining. It’s likely your own instance is at fault for the issue, not the author.
In this case it looks like Piefed deleted the post’s title.
If Mastodon is federated, why isn’t this recoverable somehow? I thought federation involved making copies of content on other servers, does that just not happen often enough for it to work as a backup?
ActivityPub (the model that the fediverse uses for federation) is publishing-based, as the name implies. Like email, you’re sending messages to a list of recipients. Usually that’s your followers, people you mention, and the person you’re replying to.
If the recipient list is empty, then your message won’t leave your instance.Threadiverse users don’t really have to worry about this too much because communities act as relays, sending your posts to all of the community’s followers as well. But microblogging instances don’t have that luxury. If they don’t have any followers, aren’t writing a reply, and don’t mention anyone… their post isn’t federated anywhere.
It’s also worth considering that only public data is federated. For example I wouldn’t be able to recover my bookmarks from another instance, and it doesn’t seem like Lemmy federates your list of subscriptions. Your posts may still exist elsewhere even when your instance goes down, but that’s not necessarily the data people want to be able to recover.
Things like subscriptions don’t seem like they should take up too much space, so it seems like a flaw that there isn’t more redundancy
Some content are just cached on other server, but not all data like credentials or full content.
Are there any best practices for backing up Mastodon accounts/data?
Why doesn’t centralized social media without backups have this problem?
Traditional social media is run for-profit and thus has an incentive to keep their website online as much as possible to keep their company alive by gaining users and revenue. And I would bet they do have backups. Hobby websites like fediverse projects often are can be run by any flaky nobody that can have varying motives and varying data retention practices.
Any city council or minor public service or library could run their own instance, though, alongside the usual website. This doesn’t have to be a hobbyist thing or for-profit enterprise.
A library running one is a great idea. Seems well aligned with their purpose.
It doesn’t have to be, but by nature of anyone being able to spin one up, people will end up on hobby instances.
But the point is that this is specifically about the problem without backup, so either we compare apples to apples or bannanas to monkeys.
Bananas 🍌 are sweet, monkeys are not (don’t ask how I know 🙊).
They did.
There’s almost hundreds of dead social media that inaccessible, some even have zero backups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services
Oh, that reminds me of this list: https://indieweb.org/site-deaths
Usually they have VC money to burn through
And/or they get bought by the competition.
Wherever you are on Mastodon, back up your data!
Dear lazyweb (or lazystodon or lazyverse), are there dead simple scripts for periodic backup? You know, something you just authorise to act as a client and then stick into a crontab to run daily/weekly and it’ll keep a local copy of your stuff. Preferably something you can just install via pip or gem or (oh please gods no) npm.
I’m not sure what people would be trying to access, I suppose. Post history? Things that can be exported, like account settings, generally should be stashed somewhere. Things that can’t be, well… That’s a bit sad but I dunno, I never post anything online that I care so much about I’d be sad if it disappeared. Anything I did care about, I make a backup of it locally.
Not trying to downplay people’s upset, but just pointing out ways to protect the things you care about.
@piratepost@poliverso.org if it’s on poliverso, then users from the “threadiverse” should be able to find it with !medmastodon@poliverso.org. And iirc, Friendica groups (or the equivalents from Lemmy, Mbin & PieFed) on Mastodon can be treated as both hashtags, and as users, e.g. on mastodon.social.
