this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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When other instances have abstract requirements and a manual approval process that takes who-knows-how-long, though, that's not always such an easy ask. People want to be where other people are, and those busier instances are the ones that set harder requirements.
When I left Reddit, I signed up on two instances: lemmy.ml and beehaw. I was eventually approved for lemmy.ml, but even now trying to access beehaw just hangs on the login page perpetually, presumably because I have not been approved and there's nothing else I can do on my end.
Not all instances do that. Many instances accept you right away.
At the bottom of any webpage (rather than the app) there is an Instances link that lists pretty much all of them. Click a few that catch your eye.
One of the admins just had a post on beehaw saying their application waitlist had been over 5000 users long. And there are just a handful of them going through it.
They found ways to speed things up a bit so they say wait time should be like 24-48 hours.
Ironic that "accounts will be portable - if you don't like the behaviour, practices, or community of one instance, you can take your data and leave" was touted as the big selling point of the Fediverse.
On more mature projects this is indeed the case. Lemmy only started federating like two years ago and is very much still in beta. We'll get there eventually and it is already in the dev queue, but keep in mind that there are only two people working on the entire codebase full time. Don't expect a Reddit level of fit and finish, but at the same time you also need not expect a Reddit level of corporate, shareholder-over-user antics.
Finally, since Lemmy is open source, if you really need a feature right now, then submit a pull request!
Get where? You appear to be responding from a technical perspective to a complaint about process. The complaint isn't (primarily) that it is technically hard to migrate data, but that moderators themselves are putting deliberate barriers in the way of migration. It doesn't matter how fast your car is if there are roadblocks every five meters.