sure you can just make a new one, but all of your old posts and comments won’t show up. Not to mention your DMs too

it seems kinda counterproductive to the goal of lemmy being federation where you can just move to another instance if yours gets bought by Elon or an admin goes corrupt, but it’s not made simple to do that.

I’ve seen many people be on lemmy.ml that would switch but they’ve been using it since the start of lemmy and they don’t wanna restart

I know mastodon has a little “hey this user has moved to @user@newinstance” popup but that’s not really that elegant either

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
    31·
    24 hours ago

    It would not be that hard. There just needs to be a way to federate the change.

    1. Authenticate the new account. This could be as simple as an account admin code that is only available when logged in, or authenticated through the old server.

    2. Scrape the old account for links and backlinks. Federate changes so that they link to the new account.

    3. You might need a workaround for mentions and follows. Those would be spread across other users’ accounts, so probably not fixable.

    4. Copy any content that was not already federated to the new host.

    If devs wanted to, they would. They don’t want to. I guess you could ask them why.

    • Hal@piefed.nzEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      For 1, there’s no central authentication. Accounts prove themselves to other instances with a private/public key pair. I guess you could have some system where the old and new instance connect then transfer that private key so the new instance could prove it’s really you nkt someone impersonating you.

      For 2, we don’t even backfill communities when they sync to an instance for the first time because of the volume. For a while, Lemmy instances would freeze (for everyone) when a user with a lot of content deleted their account, but if you wanted to achieve this I’m sure you could do some slow, async, progressive loading of the content that might happen over days, so volume alone wouldn’t make this impossible. It would also have the potential for large storage requirements or a mismatch between what is allowed on different instances, e.g. you could create an instance, load it up with spam posts, then import it to a major instance to get thousands of views before they could ban you. So here you’d need some protection. Admin review from the new instance? Only allow import from trusted instances? What if someone faked dates or other metadata in their posts before the transfer?

      1. On Lemmy, a community owns the content. So an upvote or comment will get sent to the community’s instance then that instance will federate it to other instances. If one instance transfers a user, there needs to be a way for the owners of the user’s content to federate that update. For something like Mastodon people directly follow a user so their instance is the owner, but for Lemmy with communities you need the user to tell the community about the change then that community would need to trigger the update to it’s own content. You’d have hundreds of communities each triggering updates to hundreds of instances. I see a big risk here of a user being in two states, e.g. one community federated updates ok but another didn’t, and now some instance has two records of the same user. I’m sure smarter people could work out some redundancy here.

      I honestly do think this sounds achievable but like others have said, it’s a lot of work with a lot of edge cases to cater for. So it’s likely not a high priority.