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Is account portability a thing on Lemmy? (self.lemmyworld)

submitted 1 year ago by NevermindNoMind to c/lemmyworld

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I've heard one of the benefits of activity pub is that you can take your account and its connections, content, etc, to other servers. They were talking about that today on the Vergecast as one of the selling points for Meta's new Twitter clone Threads - celebrities using the app don't have to worry about Meta shutting Threads down because they can take their accounts and followers to a new server. That doesn't seem to be a thing on Lemmy. Am I missing something about how activity pub works here?

Apologies if this is a basic question, I'm still trying to wrap my head around all of this.

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[–] Andonome 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a Github issue about it here.

There's a lot to answer on what exactly that would mean. Would you be able to edit old posts from the new instance? What if the new instance already defederated from the old? Would you retain the same username? Or are you simply getting a list of subscriptions, and copying them across?

[–] NevermindNoMind 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Very interesting, thank you for linking that. With Reddit imploding, I'd think one of the selling points of Lemmy/Kbin would be "Here, you don't have to worry about a rouge admin going nuts and nuking a server. You can just move your account (whatever that means, as you point out) to a new server." But the current answer is "If an admin nukes a server, you can just start a new account on a different server." Starting over is what we're already doing having left Reddit. I guess most people aren't as attached to their Reddit/Lemmy accounts like they are Twitter/Mastadon accounts where they build up individual followings. What do I know.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That may be a feature eventually, I think Lemmy development isn't very far along yet and the devs weren't really expecting a flood of people to suddenly show up from Reddit. I'd expect it will get a lot more polished, and additional features, now that so many people are using it and more devs are contributing to the project now.

[–] Andonome 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What I most from Reddit, is the communities there. Nobody can nuke that - if Lemmy.ml disappears, those groups will have (or make) copies elsewhere.

I don't think anyone follows me on Reddit, but if I followed people, I guess they'd re-emerge soon after. Of course that's not great if you follow 100 people - Mastodon's much better at retaining that sort of thing.

[–] erisir 2 points 1 year ago

yeah, what we'd really need is issuing ActivityPub Move events for community actors (afaik both Lemmy users and communities are actors on the ActivityPub side, thus communities can be followed / posted to from Mastodon, too). this would allow moving communities between servers to make sure that followers of the old community just carry on following the new community

I guess moving followers of users would behave in a similar way, albeit probably much less critical for the health of communities