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I have another account on a separate instance. Is there any way to merge or sync them? Or are they forever separate? (self.lemmy_support)

submitted 1 year ago by ext23 to c/[email protected]

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I read that some instances don’t allow posting on certain other instances, etc. I thought I would create an account on a smaller instance, in case this one gets too bogged down or whatever. Is there any way to sync them up?

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[–] AFKBRBChocolate 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They're separate accounts on separate servers, so currently there's no way to merge them. It would be like asking if you could merge your Gmail account and your Yahoo email account.

But "forever" is a long time. It's completely doable from a technical point of view to merge two Lemmy accounts (and doesn't require two different companies to work together like in the email example), so maybe that will be a feature at some point. Because of the potential for instances to change policies or defederate with others that you care about, many people have asked for a way to migrate an account from one instance to another (copying all the post/comment history, subscriptions, etc.), which is a similar problem and one I bet we'll see sooner than later.

[–] ext23 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So what is actually the point of having accounts on different instances, aside from keeping your post history/subscriptions etc. separate?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it's just two different places, I guess redundancy in case one goes down

[–] ext23 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I get that, but without a way to sync them, it's really just a placeholder for a username. Oh well, hopefully lemmy.world remains stable and responsive from now on.

[–] kratoz29 2 points 1 year ago

You just got some good reasons though.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 2 points 1 year ago

It's not necessary, for sure (I personally only have this account), but reasons I've seen are:

In case your home instance is down, you can still browse and post
If you're interested in content in a community that's on an instance that your home instance isn't federated with (e.g., you're on lemmy.world and want to interact with a community on beehaw.org)
To keep some kinds of activity separate from others (e.g., some people have a separate account for porn, usually on lemmynsfw.com)

Might be other reasons, too