this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2022
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The profile move section here for mastodon seems relevant.
We'd have to support a "move" activity that followers would receive, and it could overwrite their database with the new community url, and refollow.
This should probably be limited to the top mod.
All this is also predicated on that instance still being alive, and long enough for that move request to get federated everywhere.
This would be really difficult, and a ton of work, all just so people wouldn't have to click the subscribe button for a community resurrected elsewhere. So I'm not sure its really worth it.
People are often lazy, especially if I convinced them to join the "xxx instead of reddit" site to follow me. It would definitely be counterproductive to tell them again "ah no now you have to follow me on yyy, not xxx anymore".
Obviously it is right to consider the work to be done and the right priorities. Personally I love Lemmy, I would be a little sorry to be somehow linked to this instance "forever", I think the idea of decentralization and faithful universe is a little less.
just my thoughts :)
My main thinking here, is that the main reason to migrate a community anyway, is because an instance goes down. But once that instance is down, its impossible to migrate it securely anyway... otherwise communities could be easily hijacked.
I understand doubts, especially if there is a lot of work to do I think it is right to ask as many questions as possible.
Personally I think of at least two other reasons for changing the instance:
the first is a possible problem with the moderators / admin. For example in case they did questionable operations.
The second concerns me more personally: I opened a community here because there are no Italian instances. It took me a few months to convince people to sign up here, it would be ironic to tell them "no, now re-sign up somewhere else".
Since in this thread we talked about how to invite people to subscribe and / or how to create more instances for me this is one of the reasons that pushes me not to try.
In the meantime, thanks for the discussion and listening
I think it's ok to require the original instance to be online, an insecure migration should just be telling people to follow a different path imo. I think giving communities a low friction way to be nomadic would ease concerns about deciding between self hosting and using existing instances. Users could perhaps be presented with a popover to communicate the change and maybe have an archived link to the old community path. It would also be cool if you could initiate a migration using just backed up config secrets in a new instance.