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
Implementing site to site data migration is always a bit of a complicated thing, even across same software. Different instances have different settings, etc. Also, I’ve not looked at the ActivityPub protocol that deeply, but it’s not enough that you just move the data over, you also need to unpublish and republish everything so that the other instances are up to date. And all of the interaction activity like Lemmy votes would need to be updated and, and, and gaah [tearing hair out]