this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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37
Can a community be “moved”? (self.fediverse)
submitted 2 years ago by formatc to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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 2 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years 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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I was moved by this comment.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years 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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

This is so complicated lmao

[–] formatc 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I found connect, idk which others work well on Android. I couldn't seem to find liftoff. This is definitely better than mobile browser but the markdown options are kinda shitty on here tbh

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I'm not great with change haha. But yeah I'm sure I'll adjust.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Nope. You have access to everything from just one; just search for the community in the search tab and join it

To go there directly from the address bar, put /c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

You don’t have to. Implementation is a bit buggy but in theory you should be able to subscribe to and view all content from federated instances from your “home” instance

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I don't get most of it either, I learn just enough to do what I need. Did you figure out how following communities works?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Why 3rd party?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

sorry this scene just came to mind