1d ago

Yay! More centralisation!

197 comments

A lot of people start off on a major instance, then after finding and vibing with another instance, can move to that.
There's tons of tools and things that allow for transfer of subscriptions and everything else so changing instances isn't a big deal.
The important thing is to get them on Lemmy first.
- Agreed
  I started on world and quickly began hopping.
  
  joined on world, couldnt see piracy and the hopping began
  
  Thank you for spreading!
- The open-source nature of Lemmy would enable great migration tools.
  
  The devs seem opposed to letting users migrate accounts though.
  The issue for moving comms has been open since last year.
  
  I haven't looked at the Lemmy codebase but here's my thoughts on why they don't "just" fix this.
  Unless the database is designed for easy migration from it can be a very large task to modify the database layout, as you nearly have to refactor everything.
  One way to solve this is that all posts/comments/votes uses an UUID as primary key instead of auto-incrementing IDs.
  
  Hi, so moving in AP (ActivityPub) doesn't really work like that.
  Essentially, every action (like, follow, create etc) is an activity, "moving" something sends a "move" activity to every follower of an actor (group, user etc), which will make them follow the new account.
  So moving a community is really just making everyone unsubscribe from the old on, and subscribe to the new one, set the old one as read only, and setup a redirect ("This community has moved to !newcomm@instance"). The old comm will stay, and it can be browsed.
  Take a look at "nomadic identity" though, its a bit more similar to what you are talking about.
  
  Mod actions don't even federate properly yet, you have to have a local account to mod properly. And post pinning only works when the stars align. With all those basic features having issues, comm migration is nowhere near the top of the priority list.
- I guess so, but I really think we should recommend another instance this time around.
  
  What if you recommended a smaller instance and they get hugged to death and it ruins the experience for everyone else on that instance?
  Though, to be fair, world is already pretty hammered
  
  Hasn’t happened yet when I did that with Lemmy.cafe.
  The small instances can take in 10s of thousands of users before being strained.
  
  Yep, I wouldn't recommend tiny ones, the medium sized ones seem to be able to scale enough.
  
  You can always throw them into the deep end and tell them to check out hexbear
- I don't really get how to get into that. How do you find instances with more than 10 people on them ? Plus like you said, I have to make a new account for every instance which is super annoying
  
  You can use https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy to find the smollest ones.
  
  You don't need an account for every instance. For example, I am on lemm.ee, you are on lemmy.world, but I can reply to your comment.
  Every instance shares the same content.
  
  See I'm confused at this. I cannot login on lemm.ee. not sure what I'm doing wrong.
  
  Think of it like email, you can send emails to anyone on any email provider, but you can't login to gmail with your outlook info.

197 comments