Will there be a way to migrate your account to another instance?
Will there be a way to migrate your account to another instance?
I would really love if this became an option, since I'm planning on making my own instance. I'd like to keep my subscriptions, posts, comments and bookmarks and migrating would be something great. What do you think?
See the Lemmy blog:
At the same time, we are seeing lots of requests to implement major new features, such as migration between instances, or combining similar communities. As described above, we are completely overloaded with work, and definitely won’t have time to implement these in the near future. If there is a feature you want to see implemented, you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout
you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.
This is the feature in question:
Moving user profile to a new instance #1985: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
I imaginated it, there are only two developers and the work they're doing is awesome. I'd like to contribute to the project but unfortunatly I don't know Rust and all the related technologies
FYI, this is more like r/AskReddit where you ask people of Lemmy, not to ask about Lemmy. This would probably be better suited for !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml
So I’m wondering if a DIY middle ground can be reached with the API and some scripting, perhaps even just in the browser after entering your credentials.
You won’t be able to move your posts, but you could link to your old profile in your bio.
But I can see it being viable to basically download your old subscriptions and bookmarks and basically applying them to your new account.
There's already a tool for moving over the subscriptions: https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
Nice one, cheers for sharing!
I’m wondering if a DIY middle ground can be reached with the API and some scripting
There is a script somewhere which allows people to export/import their subscriptions. It did not work for me, hence I did not save it. But in theory, workarounds should be possible.
You won’t be able to move your posts, but you could link to your old profile in your bio.
You can already do that, or do I get you wrong? Probably does not help when your old instance ceases to exist.
Based, where will you update us?
The way it works on Mastodon is you essentially set up your new account on the new instance first, then you fill in the migration settings on both accounts. One to say where you've moved to, one to say where you've moved from. This adds a migration notice to your original account telling people who stumble across it where they can find you.
You can export and reimport all the important things like your bookmarks etc, but your posts stay behind on the old profile. Your followers / following is moved across, which in this case would be analogous to your subscriptions which are of course the most important thing.
I think a system like that would be perfectly fine here too. You don't really need to bring all your posts over to a new profile, they'll still be there and accessible on your old one if you need them.
I think a system like that would be perfectly fine here too. You don’t really need to bring all your posts over to a new profile, they’ll still be there and accessible on your old one if you need them.
Unless the old instance goes offline forever. Your posts and comments would still exist on remote instances, but the user profile they point to is no longer accessible.
Yes, copying subscriptions is probably the most important step, but ultimately I hope to see the ability to move everything, including history and notifications to old stuff.
That's true but it's equally true of all content you put on literally any website ever, so I figure I can choose to worry about that (in which case I guess you get into the world of exporting and scraping and backing up everything you ever contribute anywhere, which some people are really into and that's fair!), or to not worry about that.
I’m hoping it will be rare to see an instance shut down without warning. I imagine admins in most situations would make a post warning people and give them time to migrate.
What about the comments? Is it the same thing?
Yeah. A better way to describe Mastodon "migration" would be to call it account linking, or account forwarding. Each time you make a new account on a different instance you leave behind directions to the current one. Kind of like migrating your email account and leaving the old address to "forward" stuff to the new one.
I agree that it's a much cleaner system than attempting to actually move content around.
Yeah all content stays behind, so that's your toots (posts) and replies (comments). I was bit wary of migrating because of that, but just needed to change my outlook a bit and remember all online content is temporary. Tbh since your followers etc all move over with you it's made no difference at all and I can still log into the old account if I need to admin anything. Works fine!
Hey OP, just letting you know I just released a tool that does this. It's alpha, and only supports Lemmy BE 0.18.1-rc9 (and above), but if your source and destination meet that criteria, you can give it a whirl: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Do both home and target instance have to be >=rc-9?
Right now, yes - I know that's unfortunate since we still have many instances on 0.18.0, but I'm hoping they will all move up to 0.18.1 once that is officially released, which should be soon.
Supporting multiple versions of the API would be really difficult right now with it changing so often, but the hope is that in the future you can at least use an older version of LASIM to download from an older lemmy instance, then take that profile file and upload it with a newer version of LASIM to a newer instance.
To keep posts, comments is unlikely to happen. Transferring the sub list and bookmarks or just exporting them should be in the near future, at least with 3rd party apps.
Ability to migrate subscriptions would be really helpful. Not sure it makes sense to migrate the others.