Right now I love the current instance I’m on, and have trust that my instance will stick for long term. But, in the case that the instance gets shut down, is there a way for me to transfer my account data (followers and such) somewhere else (like Mastodon)? Or, is that not possible at the moment. I’m new to lemmy and figuring out what certain things i can do in the fediverse, and what insurance i have if my main instance crumbles.
Lemmy doesn’t offer native account migration, but LASIM is a standalone tool to migrate many settings.
It doesn’t redirect anyone to your new account, you’ll still need to leave a goodbye post or message in your profile pointing to your new account if you want people to find you. And it won’t migrate your post/comment/vote history (which I don’t think is possible for any tool to do right now). But it will migrate your subscribed community list and a variety of other settings so your new account feels homey to you at least.
And many people have done this with no tool. It’s not THAT much work to copy settings over by hand.
That feature doesn’t yet exist in Lemmy, though there are discussions about that on GirHub, so it’ll probably be implemented eventually.
There is technically a way to transfer all your data from one instance to another if you have access to the database. For example, you take a database dump of your user and all your info (as mydata.sql) and ask the admins of the other instance to run that against their database, you’ll be able to preserve all your user data that way. However, you’re unlikely to get an admin to agree to that (since there’s obviously a risk the SQL commands are malicious or you tampered with it in some way).
EDIT: Just found out there are many issues discussing this on the repo. Guess this post may add to the noise :P
