I think this feature will help keep communities alive if something goes wrong. I hope Lemmy implements this feature.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I totally agree. Plus it’s 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.
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
It was less so “they aren’t interested” and more so “we don’t have time right now will and the buf fixes that need implementing”.
Yeah. Really their focus has to be coping with the huge influx of users and instances.
Boring to most users, but if that’s not solid, people will encounter issues and give up on lemmy altogether
