If your instance federated with the community before it went down there will be a local copy available. The same thing happened with me with !lefthanded@wayfarershaven.eu
Bug reports on any software
When a bug tracker is inside the exclusive walled-gardens of MS Github or Gitlab.com, and you cannot or will not enter, where do you file your bug report? Here, of course. This is a refuge where you can report bugs that are otherwise unreportable due to technical or ethical constraints.
⚠of course there are no guarantees it will be seen by anyone relevant. Hopefully some kind souls will volunteer to proxy the reports.
Maybe what we need is an "inactive" value that apps/ front ends can use to display communities that haven't seen activity recently. Maybe any posts or comments in the past 3 months?
That wouldn’t exactly hit the mark because a ghost community /can/ be active. The problem is that if you have:
- someCommunity@originalNode
- nodeA/someCommunity@originalNode
- nodeB/someCommunity@originalNode
You can see the local copy of nodeA/someCommunity@originalNode if you are on nodeA. But you don’t know it is orphaned and you are in a bubble. People on nodeB can see posts in nodeB/someCommunity@originalNode, but not nodeA/someCommunity@originalNode. There is no signal that you have been cut off, and that your post will only have a local audience.
We already have transparency of activity, but not transparency of scope and reach.
I would even say adding the transparency is just a start. The real bug here is that the fedi has not figured out that nodeA and nodeB need to sync with each other regardless of the parent.