Pardon my ignorance if this is a dumb question, but can a community be moved from one instance to another? Like re-homed?
Seems like it’d be handy if the people running an instance start acting up or turning nazi or something and you want to distance your community from them.
Wouldn’t want a situation where people start concentrating communities on the instances that have the highest user counts, then that instance owner sells out to some mega corp or starts doing some shady stuff.
Would love for this to be a feature someday. It’d be hugely useful in a situation where an instance is closing down that has popular communities which would like to continue on elsewhere, that way all the content can carry over (including previous posts and existing subscribers/moderators), rather than having to start over from scratch every time.
IMO, both community and profile migrations, while not strictly necessary at the moment, are going to be crucial for the continuing success of lemmy/kbin in the future.
You can move a community, but you really have to know which heart strings to tug on.
I was moved by this comment.
Eventually it should be possible to do so. Mastodon allows migrating accounts and a Lemmy community is ultimately an “actor” under the ActivityPub protocol, just like any other Mastodon account.
sorry this scene just came to mind
Unfortunately, this is not a feature (yet). Only thing you can do is to shut off the community by making it mod-post only and then have a stickied post in it. I did that when I moved fossdroid from lemmy.ml to my own instance.
Also, with the admins of lemmy.ml (who are also the main developers of Lemmy) being tankies, yet so many people are on there, I believe that apparently, most people don’t really care.
I have a feeling we’ll be seeing 3rd party software that addresses this particular need. It is probably not particularly high-priority atm though.
Why 3rd party?
They outnumber the actual devs by an arbitrarily high number to 1.
The nice thing about open source is that you can just contribute the feature if it’s important to you instead of needing to make an external utility to do it.
Related question: do you need to create a new account for every instance you try to use? How does this stuff work?
Not necessarily. You can subscribe to a specific community on another instance by searching from your “home” instance with
!<communityname>@<server>and subscribing from there.This is so complicated lmao
It’s pretty easy if you’re doing it from within an app (e.g., Memmy here)
I think it would help if you share what specifically you want to do on other instances.
Just follow communities on them? No need, you can follow from where you already are, like the other reply says.
I guess I just have to get used to this. No matter how many times people try to explain I cannot seem to wrap my mind around the fediverse.
I don’t get most of it either, I learn just enough to do what I need. Did you figure out how following communities works?
