Can a community be “moved”? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by formatc@sh.itjust.works to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

top 20 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[-] Nerrad@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

You can move a community, but you really have to know which heart strings to tug on.

[-] Djeikup@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I was moved by this comment.

[-] Ginjutsu@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] formatc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah good point. That’s another situation where it’d be super useful.

[-] Wander@yiffit.net 3 points 1 year ago

Eventually it should be possible to do so. Mastodon allows migrating accounts and a Lemmy community is ultimately an "actor" under the ActivityPub protocol, just like any other Mastodon account.

[-] ouigol@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I don’t think there is such a feature. Best thing you can do is tell everyone to move elsewhere. I’d love to be proven wrong though

[-] OtakuAltair@vlemmy.net 2 points 1 year ago

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

[-] BornVolcano@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Related question: do you need to create a new account for every instance you try to use? How does this stuff work?

[-] hungryish@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] BornVolcano@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

This is so complicated lmao

[-] formatc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

It’s pretty easy if you’re doing it from within an app (e.g., Memmy here)

[-] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

If the instance is being federated (i.e. it's content is getting pulled in by other instances) then no. If you really want to participate in an instance that's effectively been blocked then yes, you'd need an account on that specific instance.

[-] marsokod@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Candelestine@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Why 3rd party?

[-] Candelestine@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

They outnumber the actual devs by an arbitrarily high number to 1.

[-] EveningNewbs@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

The nice thing about open source is that you can just contribute the feature if it's important to you instead of needing to make an external utility to do it.

[-] NettoHikari@social.fossware.space 1 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately, this is not a feature (yet). Only thing you can do is to shut off the community by making it mod-post only and then have a stickied post in it. I did that when I moved fossdroid from lemmy.ml to my own instance.

Also, with the admins of lemmy.ml (who are also the main developers of Lemmy) being tankies, yet so many people are on there, I believe that apparently, most people don't really care.