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.
It provides an easy way to transfer your subscriptions to a new account, but that's not exactly the same. For example, your posting history will be lost.
All of those comments and posts will remain on instances they have federated to. Transferring posting history would necessitate resubmitting every single post you've ever made, needlessly and messily duplicating one user's presence across the fediverse. And in the case of a closing instance, that bulk is multiplied several hundred or thousand times over. Not a reasonable request by any stretch.
Exacly, losing your post history is not nice
If you keep your username and avatar, people will still recognize you, I do that regularly every few months, so on the "persona" aspect people should be fine.
About the "archive" aspect, the content is still there, not sure how often people have to go back to their past posting history. Saving past important comments and posts from an old account is still an option.
No such guarantees. Usernames are not "copyrighted" across instances for very good reasons, and there is no cross verification of origin other than what you voluntarily provide on your own profile sig.
When I open an alt, admins usually check out with me to see if it's actually me.
Try to open a "dessalines" or "jordanlund" account elsewhere, you're probably going to get questioned about it.
Yes, that's a way to link your accounts.
Questioned yes, and for fair reason, but nothing technically or legally prevents it, also for good reason. Would you say for example that Jordan Lund has an automatic legal claim to the username "jordanlund" everywhere? How about Jordan B. Lund? Or Jordan S. Lund? Or Jörd Anlund? Don't they have just as much "right" to that username, even if it is in a different instance?
As we discussed before, linking both accounts in the bio achieve the goal