Citizens of Lemmy and Fediverse, Reddit refugee here. Many outrages have befallen, but sensing the impending demise of the website brought me here.

Through browsing, I’ve began to understand a few fragments of how the Fediverse works, instances, the way they communicate. It’s quite ingenuous actually, specially the way they distribute communities across various servers, easily reachable from a single server via a “remote” format. Fixing one of the problems that the Forums of old had.

But while I can access, post and comment on a remote instance. From what I came to understand, I believe that that the instance I signed up on, will always be the ‘local’ one.

If for whatever reason, one were to migrate instances, leaving their local behind towards a new one, taking their account history and configuration with them. Is that possible?

Thank you for reading and have a fine day.

  • tromars@feddit.deEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Account migration is not supported at the moment but is a feature that is being worked on afaik

    • ArkyonVeil@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Doesn’t seem very practical, something like this being possible (one click from account settings) would be very useful for the decentralization of the platform.

    • ArkyonVeil@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for clearing it up. What is there right now isn’t much, but it should suffice for the tech inclined userbase we have right now.

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I understand how the Fediverse has instances, and how they communicate, and how you can (in theory) access the entire Fediverse from one account. But I don’t do that, for a few reasons:

    • If I see a server with more than a handful of communities I am interested in, I want a presence there in case they need to defederate for a time for some reason.

    • I find browsing by “all” to be way too overwhelming on some instances. I find it easier to browse by “local”.

    • Different instances have different moderation standards so if I am subbed to multiple communities there having an account makes it easier to keep the differences in mind

    • Jerboa can handle multiple logins.

    • It reduces confusion because I can grab the same handle in multiple places.

    So, I have an account on multiple instances, even though I understand I only need one. I won’t ever feel the need to migrate because I am already the same human in multiple contexts.