I started on one of the smaller instances, and guess what? They didn’t make it. I spent about two days setting up my account searching for all the communities I wanted, and had a great feed. Then about a week later, they were gone. I can’t fault the admin- they were doing a lot of work and running up a server bill largely for gratis, but I lost all that setup time. So when I had to start a new account I chose to go to one of the moderately large instances because I didn’t want it to go poof overnight again.
What I’m saying is there is safety in the medium to large instances.
That said, I do have some problems with some of the largest instances throwing their weight around in performing global bans on users from other instances whose world views differ from theirs.
I’m beginning to see that in order for lemmy to be truly federated, users must also become federated
If anything, I would say user data should be a lot more perishable than it is. Original content, answers to questions that don’t need to be answered again with a good search system, those are nice to preserve, but every word from every conversation ever?
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances from this i used monyet.cc since they didn’t need email discuss.online is good as well
I don’t think the point of the post was to say everybody huddle into 10-user instances. The problem currently is there are maybe 5 or so large instances roughly within the same amount of users, then lemmy.world has 10x the amount of the next largest. I’d like to see communities get more spread out into things like startrek.website but there isn’t really a way to do that for the more general communities like Technology, Gaming, etc. because any instance could really have those.
Mastodon allows you to transfer accounts between instances and IIRC there a feature in the Lemmy roadmap that will allow you to do the same for accounts and communities. Can’t happen soon enough.
Judging from this issue
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
It is not fixed. I think you lose your history and relationships in the current barebone migration functionality.
If this were fixed, the sign up process could be streamlined and users could be stuffed in any random open instance without fear they’ll be caught there and lose their identity when the instance owner turns out to be a dick
That only exports settings and subscriptions, I think what they’re talking about is a solution that allows you to migrate everything including your ownership of the posts and comments that you made.
It’s definitely better than nothing but it’s probably not what they are looking for, hopefully we’ll get a true account migration system soon.
