Humans who run instances are real people who have jobs and mortgages and kids. I also like having piracy communities around to balance the greedy ass corporations trying to control media and copyright…I’m glad to know they are there if I need them or feel like screwing around with it. I just wonder if the people ranting all indignantly acting like instances are competing for their usership would feel the same if the most active instance was on a server physically sitting in their basement, or paid for by money tied to them in the real world. Yes it seems pretty unlikely that you’re ever going to run into issues with law enforcement, copyright claims, lawsuits…but how much would you risk for a fucking hobby you do for free? Would you risk your house? Your job? I would not. Grow up. No one cares what instance you use.
Not to mention it’s not like Reddit where they’re doomed to their fate. The fedi is literally designed to get around this. That’s the whole point! Swapping instances is absolutely free. Though it is a bit of a pain without official migration tools so hopefully that gets fixed soon.
Almost painless using https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim (showing the link for potential readers, I think I remember sharing it to you a while back)
Yeah but the point is that it should be like Mastodon where it’s built in. Or at least with Lemmy, it’d be more appropriate just to be able to import/export your subscribe list, blocks, and settings.
I guess everyone would like this built in, as well as instance blocking and moderation tools.
Those are the three big topics to be addressed, and I assume they require quite a lot of work from the devs and the rest of the contributors.
Yeah also it’s easy to forget that these are devs doing this in the free time out of goodwill. They aren’t a company with an IPO they’re trying to hit.
Glad we have that tool 👍 but it’s not a full migration to my knowledge. I don’t think your post history migrates with you, for example. Just one ramification of that is if someone replies to an old post of yours, you won’t know on your new instance.
Also folks that have established communities on an instance (shameless plug for [email protected]) can’t uproot and move it to another instance (yet).
Indeed, but I’m not sure even Mastodon offers that feature. I’m in that case quite often as I have a lot of alts. It’s okay for now, I don’t usually change accounts that often, and when I do, I have a one-week timeframe when I change the previous account as well.
The community moving is another issue, but for that one to happen would be really though. Quite easy to abuse, because attackers could just create fake communities with thousands of GBs of pictures and just dump those on targeted instances. It’s easier to monitor normal content creation, and even limit the creation of communities as some instances already do.
Firefish does let you import your Mastodon GDPR export, so it can be done. However the problem Lemmy will need to solve if it wants to offer this functionality is that all those posts are bound to new accounts, so you’ll either have duplicate posts or they won’t be shown.
A “true” post migration feature that replaces the owner of an existing post (as opposed to making backdated posts) would likely need an ActivityPub extension that the entire ecosystem an agree to, and of course that needs to consider proper authorization so a malicious instance can’t take over an account with a malicious migration request.
Hmm good points. Maybe moving communities should require admin approval from the instance you’re moving to?
Could be, but then the issue is that you would need to have a look at what is inside that community.
Who is going to ensure that GBs of text, comments and links are all legal and safe content? We are talking about piracy here, but there could be CP or other nasty stuff.
It’s quite a large risk to blindly trust someone to dump such a large amount of content on your instance.
You can moderate cross-instance as far as I’m aware. I agree that communities should be able to move as well, but from what I’ve seen from previous attempts by other communities .world admins will just find new mods and reopen the existing community.