Yes. It is a must have feature, actually.

I think it should be a "copy community" feature, then mods can just prevent posts in the old community and make a sticky that points to the new location.

Making users automatically subscribe to a community on a different instance (even if it's "the same community") is pushing it a bit in terms of moderator power. Also makes things worse in terms of exploits and others have pointed out.

Risky. Some hacker exploits a vulnerability, takes over the community and migrates it to some other server.... then what?

Also, if a community leaves a specific server, what stops anyone else from re-creating it in the original server?

Data portability for instances and users is imo an essential feature of any fediverse app, and sorely missing here on Lemmy/Kbin. We’ve already seen the issue surface with the hacks in instances last week and other instances going down suddenly. Like mastodon, we need to be able to take our data to whatever instance we want easily.

But that also makes it incredibly easy for communities on defederated servers to set up shop elsewhere.

And those communities may be the sole reason that the server was defederated in the first place.

I think a possible outcome is that the larger instances would have to put a stop to open creation of new communities, to prevent toxic groups from setting up shop and moving all their objectionable content and users into the space.

This is indeed a very important feature. It needs to take into account that if similar name community exists on another server how the merger would proceed as well in terms of exporting and importing cache of posts and comments.

But generally it should be easier to transfer from one instance to other.

At first I thought this was a great idea. But need to understand a bit more about the security implications for those that subscribe and post to the communities that want to do a move. It's one thing to trust your credentials to the host server, but quite another to implicitly trust the community mod who wishes to move. How would the old posts migrate? How would integrity of the constituent posts be preserved? How easy would it be to inject comments into to historical posts and republish them on the new, official, server? Could you be held liable (whether officially or through reputational risk) for posting content that wasn't really yours? Maybe there are good mechanisms to maintain integrity of data? I'm just not sure what they are.

I think there may be implications to this that are not obvious.

Happy to have these concerns assuaged, of course!

server gets defederated, server moves to new server, defederation bypassed.

It's going to be incredibly necessary in the long run. Decentralized means some proportion of important communities are going to be on servers that will eventually be shut down for various reasons. Not everybody who's running an instance now will run it forever, but there may be communities with important conversations that folks will want to preserve.

Mastodon has account migration and Lemmy community migration should work similarly.

Just thought I'd flag this up: !issue_tracker@lemm.ee

It's a community to coordinate idea suggestions as well as image tracking. Perhaps this could be flagged up over there with a link back here or cross-posted.

It should, but the Lemmy devs are swamped right now to add more features. Before, they had a pretty small dev team too. Now that there's a lot more eyes on Lemmy, hopefully we'll get more features while they iron out the stability issues.

Additionally, if your server disappears *cough* VLemmy *cough* you should be able to load a backup from somewhere and register your channels on another server. I realize this is still a crawl-walk-run scenario and that's going to be far in the future. But we can still hope for it.

And somehow be redundant/mirrored/backed up. Hacks, crashes, instance owner gets pissed, decides to take their sandbox and everything in it. Lots of ways and reasons that communities wlll disappear and a way to recover might be helpful.

Yep, I lost my communities when vlemmy shut down

Absolutely. I don’t think we really have fediverse until we get this.

Agreed!

I feel like this opens up the doors to "impostor" instances opening up, copying content from another instance and re-uploading it elsewhere. I can already think of tons of opportunities to commit various types of fraud this way, honestly.

There may also be legal issues with importing user account data and content, as well.

What actually happens when servers are federated with one another? Does the content of each server get mirrored for redundancy, or does it just mean that users can see users, posts and communities from servers that are federated? When they defederate, does content that was previously visible to users just vanish completely, or is it merely that new content (created after defederation) will not be visible?

Yeah there HAS to be a way to cache all the posts comments replies etc at a certain point. Maybe every so often it flashes a cache on your server; saves everything; and lets you either create new with what you had OR move or.

That would be a great feature.