Pardon my ignorance if this is a dumb question, but can a community be moved from one instance to another? Like re-homed?
Seems like it’d be handy if the people running an instance start acting up or turning nazi or something and you want to distance your community from them.
Wouldn’t want a situation where people start concentrating communities on the instances that have the highest user counts, then that instance owner sells out to some mega corp or starts doing some shady stuff.
It’s been opened on the github already, along with user account migration.
Mastodon already has user migration, so it might not be far off for lemmy
Related question: do you need to create a new account for every instance you try to use? How does this stuff work?
Think of it like an email address. Any account you have can talk to any other email provider, there are no limitations on that.
If you are not happy with your email provider (Lemmy instance), you can always create a new address at another provider and use that one. There are currently no features to automatically migrate all your history, but that may come.
I think it would help if you share what specifically you want to do on other instances.
Just follow communities on them? No need, you can follow from where you already are, like the other reply says.
I guess I just have to get used to this. No matter how many times people try to explain I cannot seem to wrap my mind around the fediverse.
Not necessarily. You can subscribe to a specific community on another instance by searching from your “home” instance with !<communityname>@<server> and subscribing from there.
Same as reddit though? Now you just put @server.url after the subreddit/community name when going there directly from the address bar on pc
You get used to it pretty quick
You can move a community, but you really have to know which heart strings to tug on.
I have a feeling we’ll be seeing 3rd party software that addresses this particular need. It is probably not particularly high-priority atm though.
Would love for this to be a feature someday. It’d be hugely useful in a situation where an instance is closing down that has popular communities which would like to continue on elsewhere, that way all the content can carry over (including previous posts and existing subscribers/moderators), rather than having to start over from scratch every time.
IMO, both community and profile migrations, while not strictly necessary at the moment, are going to be crucial for the continuing success of lemmy/kbin in the future.
