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User migration as well as community migration in case of instances going into a black hole would indeed be useful features.
They are features that will inevitably materialise sooner or later. Mastodon already has tools to accommodate this need, and lemmy runs on the same protocol. No reason the same need won't eventually be met. Both kbin and lemmy are very new. Mastodon has been a thing for a while now, in comparison.
I tried doing a Mastodon user migration (to a Pleroma instance), and it basically just didn't' work. This is one of those thing where the code is likely to rot from lack of testing.
But if everyone can access this feature someone will inevitably do a DDoS.
And community list will be a mess.
Why would you let everyone access the feature? This would be an admin/owner feature.
I totally agree. Plus itβs an additional fail safe in case one instance gets too big or does something that makes people want to migrate, without losing popular communities that it might have.
The ability to keep the same community name and just move to a different server is going to be so useful. Makes reddit look so primitive where you had to make some weird alternative name when the mods got crazy.
Ok, I'm new here and my understanding is on shaky ground.
That said, I was under the impression that when you subscribe to a community on another instance, it sort of does get cloned to your own? But everything still has to sync through the master instance somehow. If that were to go down, your locally cached copy would presumably be orphaned, and I'm not really sure what happens at that point? Could it be made into the new master somehow?
I think it's more or less as you describe. I think what OP is suggesting would be more like a way to migrate a community. Export everything from [email protected] and import everything to [email protected]
I think something like this exists for Mastodon users, but I've never played with it. You could use this to migrate communities from an instance that was going down or otherwise no longer suitable. Even if all old conversations are "frozen" or locked, it would still be useful upon occasion.
Could probably be doable with database fuckery. Make a second community locally with an identical name, then in the backend swap some IDs around and make it think the posts were actually in the new one all along.
Granted, I haven't looked at the DB structure, so I don't know how plausible it is. If someone tries it, don't blame me if the instance breaks, do at your own risk.
But that creates a problem with potential duplicate name, but there is even bigger problem. By export I assume You mean taking ownership so adopting this community into the new server, who decides that? First come first served does not look good in my eyes as a good solution. Since that community is stored as a copy in other instances it should maybe just go into read only mode for eternity
something like this exists for Mastodon users
I believe Mastodon allows you to transfer your followers list, but not any content you generated, such as messages or likes. You can export both followers and content, but at the moment there's no way of importing content to new instances, only your followers.
You understand correctly. Migrating an instance would involve updating the source of truth to a different instance, and somehow notifying all other instances to stop checking the old instance and start checking the new.
Maybe ActivityPub (the protocol the Fediverse is built on) already has a method for assigning redirects, but I would have so many questions. What happens to instances that are experiencing an outage during the migration? What happens with blocked instances if that block is removed after the migration? How long would the redirect notice live? What if a new community with the same name is created on the original instance? What happens to old links pointing to the old instance? Personally, implementing such a feature sounds like a huge headache.
As for what happens to an an instance once it is orphaned (say the instance with the "true" community blocks another instance or goes dark), then the orphaned copies will become little islands that are only accessible to members on the orphaned instance and any comments, votes, etc are no longer shared across the Fediverse.
I wish when you subscribe for the first time from another instance it would populate it with the comments that viewers of that community from that instance see even if you can't interact with old comments.
Finding a community then joining lot of times leads to the place looking dead until you view it from the instance of that community and all of a sudden see there is discussions there. But, return back to viewing from your instance and it'll never populate with the old content and only the new.
Could be much worse, tbh. Another piece of software I run is called lotide. It's a much simpler piece of software which has some appealing parts, but everything about each community you join starts from the moment you sign up. There could be a long history of really interesting posts, doesn't matter. Every community you join it's as if it was just created.
Yeah I'm honestly seeing this as a big turn off for users to join smaller instances, which is a goal many fediverse people want.
It really sucks that I made an account on a smaller instance for lemmy, and there were some technical difficulties/learning curve on my end to add a community (which I won't run into if I stay on a large instance), but then even after I did add the community, there are no posts. I made a lemmy account since it allows you to save posts, which kbin atm can't do. However, when I'm able to add the community on the lemmy account, there's none of the previous posts, so I can't save it.
Does kbin have better post and comments retrieval than lemmy? If so I might use kbin at least for tracking communities.
I don't know, I'm thinking they are probably about the same. Even though I'm trying both lemmy and kbin, I'm on a large kbin server and on a small lemmy server. I think that can make a bigger difference for the ignorant (me) than lemmy vs kbin. It can get kind of complicated to do some basic tasks, and I think it's good if these aggregators can make it easier to do.
For Kbin, I am liking the way they organize my feed, but I think you can customize your filter/sort on lemmy to do the same. Plus they have the android mobile app Jerboa, so I'm sure the experience for the feed can be good (don't have to keep resetting the filter the way I'm doing on browser [since I dont have an android phone])
Definitely feel free to make these accounts though :) It's been cool, like a big experiment to make these two accounts. I have one on lemmy.studio and kbin.social
Doesn't seem like it. When viewing a low volume community on kbin.social, I see zero posts and zero comments. View it from the original instance (lemmy.ml) and there are four posts in the past week, with three of them having comments. kbin.social became aware of the community two days ago according to the infobar. All of the posts were made prior to that date.
Edit: I've also been subscribed to it for two days from kbin.social.
Is this a Lemmy specific issue? I've never noticed that you seem to be describing with kbin. But I don't really understand it. Do you have to subscribe to see posts on Lemmy? Cause on kbin, you can see threads fine for communities and instances you've never subscribed to. And when you do subscribe, you can see older posts and comments.
I've discovered countless Lemmy communities to subscribe to in the first place from viewing kbin's equivalent of /all.
If I understand things correctly, communities from other instances aren't going to appear on the front page of kbin.social until a user first subscribes to them. It's good for getting exposure to active communities that you weren't aware of, but some of the more niche and low volume communities from other instances aren't going to start appearing until a user proactively goes looking for them.
This wouldn't work for the actual content however, as those are posted by individual users from all around the fediverse.
Exporting settings, moderators and alike might be feasible, though.
User migration is fine, but community migration is going to have a lot of concerns. How would you feel if the migration went to a domain that you fundamentaly disagree with?
Same way I would if the moderators added particularly problematic moderator or changed the rules in a way I found unacceptable. Moderators can do either of those, and the possibility of moving to a bad server is similar.
Agreed. Free speech is ment to be painful sometimes, so going to a site yoiu don't fundamentally agree with is part of the fair process, IMHO. On the flip side, getting outside of one's own echo chamber can be a growth opportunity.
By clone you mean migrate? Double content will piss of Google and the users, searching for the/a new community.
Double content being shown to Google is kind of inevitable, given how Lemmy (and the Fediverse in general) works.
