This is my current understanding of the situation:
- The admins are no longer interested in running the instance, due to increasing demand, missing moderation features and waves of abuse from external actors.
- Transferring the instance to someone else is a complicated issue. Even though there is not a large amount of private information in Lemmy's database, you can not simply transfer the trust the users placed in the original admin to the new owner.
- Lemmy still does not provide an easy way to migrate accounts
Given all the above, shutting down the instance seems to be the natural course of action. I'd like to propose an alternative: freeze the instance activity and keep it in some form of "read-only" mode until Lemmy matures.
What would that require?
- Take the instance down (no more incoming activities)
- Run a script that generates static json files for every actor (user, community), federated object (post, comment, report) and activity (like/dislike votes, announce activities, etc)
- Set up a static site to serve all that JSON.
- Take the media on pict-rs and move to some long-term back up system.
- (Optional, but could be helpful in the future) allow users to checkout the private keys of their own user and community actors.
This won't help solve the current problems and it wouldn't help with the users who now will have to move away to a new instance, but it could eventually help for users who want to restore the activity on a new server.
I've been experimenting with an implementation for Decentralized Identifiers for ActivityPub that can make it possible for people to move servers but maintain their identity (similar to bluesky's PLC directory), so perhaps we could have a future where users can fully migrate their accounts from server to server without requiring intervention from admins.
The issue is that currently we don't have the technical features needed for such an attitude: namely, transfering the communities. Decentralised IDs would also help.
Yeah, again... unpopular opinion but just embrace the transience. How necessary is "transferring" a community. There's very few communities with content that provides some kind of reference.
Exactly.
If you're making posts or comments that you want preserved, you should be backing them up anyway.
It would be nice if the export function copied saved items as well as subs and blocks though.
It does copy saved items.
It does? I have no clue how I missed that. Thank you very much
ActivityPub does not have that feature or ability. Other federation type software does. But being as Lemmy is built with ActivityPub for federation, it can't offer instance independent identities.
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md
It does, as an FEP.
Not just transferring communities, but also posting history (much of what makes a user's identity).
I'm starting to think that the best way to use Lemmy for posterity is actually the same way as using Reddit for posterity (assuming you'd want to do that): rather than submit your comments directly there, post them in your own blog or smth and just make your lemmy/reddit comments links to your home-comments.
Do people really make comments with that level of gravity though?
Right? I just use Lemmy has a hobby and shitpost here and there. Some people are taking this way too seriously
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45876780
I'd say it doesn't count unless it also moves all followers, which this doesn't.
It would if all the users were on Piefed instances. I instantly got 100 subscribers on that community as they were Piefed users.
Piefed also has a "subscribers" tab in the mod panel, so you can reach out to subscribers about a move.