It’s easy to say “don’t get tied down”, but people do. People like their online personas, their handles, their comment and post history. It’s a mixture of sunk-cost fallacy and FOMO. Reddit knows this, it’s why they still have 2000x as many monthly users as Lemmy.
This will be the same here: if a billionaire buys the biggest instance, yeah cool everyone can defederate, but then all the historical content is gone, most of the users are gone unless they move to you or an instance still federated to you, and you essentially alienate yourself.
Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.
Your posts will not be moved, due to technical limitations. There is also a 30 day cooldown period in which you cannot migrate again, so be very careful before using this option!
It’s not that easy to implement. Any feature that lets you import posts would just be a bypass for any kind of spam protection or rate limit. You could just “import” thousands of spam posts at a time, without the server being able to prevent it, because it seems totally legitimate.
It’s easy to say “don’t get tied down”, but people do. People like their online personas, their handles, their comment and post history. It’s a mixture of sunk-cost fallacy and FOMO. Reddit knows this, it’s why they still have 2000x as many monthly users as Lemmy.
This will be the same here: if a billionaire buys the biggest instance, yeah cool everyone can defederate, but then all the historical content is gone, most of the users are gone unless they move to you or an instance still federated to you, and you essentially alienate yourself.
That’s why mastodon pushed for account migration features. They made a bunch of them.
There is also bluesky that made their own protocol to handle identities diffretly than ActivityPub.
There is just not enough devs to code that stuff in Lemmy.
Mastodon still doesn’t allow account import
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export
It’s not that easy to implement. Any feature that lets you import posts would just be a bypass for any kind of spam protection or rate limit. You could just “import” thousands of spam posts at a time, without the server being able to prevent it, because it seems totally legitimate.
should def strive for it for lemmy aswell.
can’t find much info on the subject on github for it unfortunate
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/account-migration/3058
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985