Café

don't scare our admins 😱

monyet already has a dev instance, so they can import the db from the main instance there, and do the db migrations to see if that'll succeed.

precautionary measures can be taken on the dev instance so it doesn't attempt to federate with all the data from here.

i can think of (for testing out db migrations on the dev instance):

• run lemmy_server with the --disable-scheduled-tasks cli flag, which will prevent background federation tasks from running (so federation events will only be triggered by actual interaction, like posting, voting, subscribing, and of course such things should not be done on the dev instance)

• if that's still not enough and we want to be extra sure the dev instance doesn't federate with data from over here, then just block outgoing http/https connections at the firewall while doing the db migrations try-out (also don't run lemmy-ui and just watch the docker logs for it to say migrations completed successfully)

i think the lemmy.zip admins said they're still trying to work out a way to spin a dev instance on a dedicated server, but monyet already has a dev instance, so the db migrations can be tried first to ensure safety.