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.
Account migration is not supported at the moment but is a feature that is being worked on afaik
It isn’t built into Lemmy yet.
It’s possible with Mastodon (import/export feature), however it’s up to the service in question to support such a system. Lemmy doesn’t support this yet but I believe it’s a planned feature.
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.
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:
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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.
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I find browsing by “all” to be way too overwhelming on some instances. I find it easier to browse by “local”.
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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
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Jerboa can handle multiple logins.
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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.
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I think it is possible but I have never done it.
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.
