There is a Lemmy Account Settings Instance Migrator tool:
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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I have use this and I can vouch that it works on most instances; I moved my subscriptions from another instance to mander.xyz using this tool.
But I also have another account in a smaller instance and it doesn't work. I'm guessing that instance hasn't been updated.
Author of the tool here! If you are okay letting me know the instance, I can definitely take a look and see if I can figure out the issue. I might need to make an account though.
There's lots of Lemmy instances, and I'm always finding new quirks with different configs. But it'll help the next person who might run into the same thing!
I don't know how savvy you are but I have seen some posts about people offering some options. A quick Google for instance gives me this: https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
It would be best if activitypub could somehow keep one account across all instances
Yep. It's an issue that comes up again and again. "nomadic identity" is the name commonly given to it. Search or ask around and you may find conversations about it. It is probably the single most objectively lacking aspect of the fediverse given how often people independently realise it.
This fediverse at least. AT Protocol, used for bluesky, supports nomadic identity. Instead of accounts being @[email protected], they attach your domain / home instance / whatever, to a DID. You can read more about it in their various spec pages but here's the one for DIDs.
Well, Hubzilla / Streams, using Zot, which can federate over activity pub also have nomadic identity apparently, while I've read ActivityPub authors say that nomadic identity could be done on it but that no one has put the work in ... so it's not so clean cut as that.
Also ... I don't think BlueSky can be called a "fediverse" yet until decentralisation is shown to work well let alone until they even allow it and open signups. However much promise their tech/protocol has they, at the moment, are rather behind in terms of growth and scale.
Agreed. Ideally we would be able to completely migrate identities between instances. I know Mastodon has this capability (haven't tried it, don't know how difficult it is).