Idea: if you mod a community on a lemmy.somewhere you should be able to migrate it to lemmy.elsewhere which would include all post & comment links being forwarded and subbed users having their subscription updated to reflect the new location.
I’m aware this would be a way down the road as user account migration alone is still not great but it would be a great feature for the fediverse to have to avoid centralisation and mod/server admin wars.
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This is indeed a very important feature. It needs to take into account that if similar name community exists on another server how the merger would proceed as well in terms of exporting and importing cache of posts and comments.
But generally it should be easier to transfer from one instance to other.
Just thought I’d flag this up: !issue_tracker@lemm.ee
It’s a community to coordinate idea suggestions as well as image tracking. Perhaps this could be flagged up over there with a link back here or cross-posted.
Does a bot post issues raised / commented on Lemmy, back into GitHub? Or is it just one directional?
I think they are still figuring that out.
Cheers!
I think it should be a “copy community” feature, then mods can just prevent posts in the old community and make a sticky that points to the new location.
Making users automatically subscribe to a community on a different instance (even if it’s “the same community”) is pushing it a bit in terms of moderator power. Also makes things worse in terms of exploits and others have pointed out.
Mastodon uses aliasing for account migration. Your old account still exists on the original server, but it points to your new account. Following the old account automatically reroutes the follow to the new one. This could be done at the group level for lemmy without needing to manually lock the original group or ask users to find the new one.
The issue is that users might object to subscribing to a community on a particular instance. I guess it’s not the end of the world, you can always unsubscribe but I can imagine some people being very upset to be associated with certain politically leaning instances or worse.
Perhaps a notification when it occurs, so you could unsubscribe if you wish.
That is what happens on Mastodon now when someone moves their account from one server to another — you get a notification of them following you from the other server.
I don’t use mastodon. Do users need to reciprocate? So if I followed you and you moved server would I still get a notification, or only if you follow me?
Can anyone follow you, so does the notification let you know that it’s a change, rather than a new follower.
It is all automatic.
You maintain the same relationship after the move.
If you just followed them, but they didn’t follow you — that continues after the move.
If they just followed you, but you didn’t follow them — that continues after the move.
If you followed each other — that continues after the move.
It is all automatic.
…
As a user, if someone who follows you moves their account, you see that as a new follow in your notifications.
Yes. It is a must have feature, actually.
Data portability for instances and users is imo an essential feature of any fediverse app, and sorely missing here on Lemmy/Kbin. We’ve already seen the issue surface with the hacks in instances last week and other instances going down suddenly. Like mastodon, we need to be able to take our data to whatever instance we want easily.
Yeah there HAS to be a way to cache all the posts comments replies etc at a certain point. Maybe every so often it flashes a cache on your server; saves everything; and lets you either create new with what you had OR move or.
At first I thought this was a great idea. But need to understand a bit more about the security implications for those that subscribe and post to the communities that want to do a move. It’s one thing to trust your credentials to the host server, but quite another to implicitly trust the community mod who wishes to move. How would the old posts migrate? How would integrity of the constituent posts be preserved? How easy would it be to inject comments into to historical posts and republish them on the new, official, server? Could you be held liable (whether officially or through reputational risk) for posting content that wasn’t really yours? Maybe there are good mechanisms to maintain integrity of data? I’m just not sure what they are.
I think there may be implications to this that are not obvious.
Happy to have these concerns assuaged, of course!
Possibly some kind of democratic voting system would work? Or maybe the mods must all vote to do the move. Just an idea from when I saw another instance do a vote (for federation) using emojis, on a post, and they just counted them basically.
(edit: The mastadon method seems feasible though posts need to move too.)
And somehow be redundant/mirrored/backed up. Hacks, crashes, instance owner gets pissed, decides to take their sandbox and everything in it. Lots of ways and reasons that communities wlll disappear and a way to recover might be helpful.
All of this could be there with the matrix.org protocol. The matrix protocol saves the comments and content in a directed graph, and that graph is copied to every instance, once one views it. It may not scale though. But it has benefits, such as encryption (making communities private or gated when under attack)
I’ve been out of this loop for decades, but can see a train wreck if this vulnerability isn’t addressed.
Matrix says, “The functionality that Matrix provides includes: Creation and management of fully distributed chat rooms with no single points of control or failure…”
I don’t know what ‘fully distributed’ means. But one potential way of securing everything might be through something like torrenting. Have all Instances on several servers, such that the loss of a single server or Instance couldn’t wipe out a community. If that happens more than a few times, I could see federating setback considerably.
That’s my two cents, and I’ll leave it to the smarter and more capable folks to resolve.
when a user on a server is in a room it is “hosting” the room so if the server the room was made on goes down, everyone who’s not on that server can still talk in the room, that does make the hardware requirements higher compared to XMPP for sure which is a downside but I do feel like the positives outweigh the negatives personally at least
Proper backup protocol raises HW requirements. But if you want to do something right, it’s just the cost of doing business. There’s the old saw, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?” But there may not be an opportunity to do this one over.
I foresee moneyed interests working steadily, diligently, relentlessly (with paid labor!) to help this entire effort fail. The success of this concept represents the loss of inestimable billions to today’s dominant platforms. Those corporations will, as always, work hard toward their self interests.
server gets defederated, server moves to new server, defederation bypassed.
This is part of why it’s better to have users block servers instead of servers block servers.
It should, but the Lemmy devs are swamped right now to add more features. Before, they had a pretty small dev team too. Now that there’s a lot more eyes on Lemmy, hopefully we’ll get more features while they iron out the stability issues.
Agreed!
What actually happens when servers are federated with one another? Does the content of each server get mirrored for redundancy, or does it just mean that users can see users, posts and communities from servers that are federated? When they defederate, does content that was previously visible to users just vanish completely, or is it merely that new content (created after defederation) will not be visible?
Currently it just means you can post to communities on the servers yours is federated with.
It doesn’t mean you can sign into the other server with your account a la “sign in with Google/Twitter/etc.” That needs to change first.
I disagree. If one is that important, I say those mods need to create their own instance.
They would still need to be able to migrate the community to their own instance.
Yeah I understand that but I just disagree with automatically moving people around between instances.
But that’s not what this conversation is about.
It would be the mod/admin who moves a community to a new instance, and the users would migrate themselves to follow the community.
Neither functionality exists but I agree that users should not be moved automatically unless it’s part of an SSO scenario.
That’s not what I read anywhere but I agree with the way you worded it.
I might have made some of that up but thank you for catching the intent of it.
Why?
I just personally wouldn’t want someone duplicating and creating me an account on another instance. Maybe if it’s developed in the future you just get a notification asking if you’d like to follow this community to such and such instance. At that point you get a prompt to accept or deny. I’m fine with that.
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Not true.
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I’m running one. It doesn’t require a lot of resources.
If you end up with a crazy substantial amount of users it can get dicey, but if the community is that amazing the donations would probably roll in.
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It’s going to be incredibly necessary in the long run. Decentralized means some proportion of important communities are going to be on servers that will eventually be shut down for various reasons. Not everybody who’s running an instance now will run it forever, but there may be communities with important conversations that folks will want to preserve.
Mastodon has account migration and Lemmy community migration should work similarly.
Mastodon migration is still somewhat limited.
Your posts don’t transfer over, being the big catch.
(Most everything else does, though)
And Lemmy should also have account migration.
I made a tool that does this until we can get something baked into Lemmy itself: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
There are a handful of other options out there too if ya search for em. Mine backs up / copies subscriptions, blocks, and a handful of profile settings.
I feel like this opens up the doors to “impostor” instances opening up, copying content from another instance and re-uploading it elsewhere. I can already think of tons of opportunities to commit various types of fraud this way, honestly.
There may also be legal issues with importing user account data and content, as well.
Nothing is stopping anyone from copying content already.
Legal issues - possibly, but then everything you write or do is federated already.
Every instance is doing this, right now. When you post on one instance, every instance with a single subscriber to the community gets sent a copy.
On kbin, even the media is stored on the instance. It helps distribute the load. Instances share posts between instances which can then each support many users.
In terms of “taking over” a community. Not so easy.
See, I could take fediverse@lemmy.world from my instance, do some SQL hacking and turn it into a local community. But, that would only work on my instance. Everyone else would still be following the original and the original would still exist.
For it to work it needs to be a co-ordinated community move.
Mods pick an instance with as much of the original data already federated as possible. They communicate the new home. People start subscribing, the old group is made read only with a message linking the new one.
To keep existing posts though other instances would also need to SQL hack. So adding some features to communicate and automate the SQL effort would be a nice thing.
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