What happens to the community if the instance is deleted?
What happens to the community if the instance is deleted?
New to lemmy, created a community on lemmy.world for a game that I enjoy. If I understand it right, if the lemmy instance goes down, your user data also goes down. Is this the same with communities as well? Is there a way to move your community to a new instance if that happens?
TIA.
If an instance goes down, then so do all the communities on it. Perhaps it the future, you could be able to migrate a community or an account to another instance. I know Mastodon has a future for migrating an account.
Migrating profiles should be possible at some point in the future, as well and importing and exporting content profiles. Not necessarily comments or posts, but your follows and subscriptions.
Regarding communities themselves, posts and comments, that's much trickier but it's feasible that the Lemmy community will develop a way to:
A) Archive content in such a way that it's read only and requires super low resources to host by interested internet archivists. B) but which is still connected to the fediverse so that the original content authors, after authenticating somehow, can request deletion of specific content
Ideally we'd want to associate each Lemmy account to a unique random public key and sign each post or comment with a secret key that only you know. Maybe your instance can hold the key in encrypted form and deliver it to your browser to decrypt with a simple password so that the user doesn't have to care about any of this. To them it would still be username and password.
Anyways, this would allow you to still authenticate yourself in the far future when your instance no longer exists and request deletion of whatever content you wrote in the past.
There is no community migration feature to Lemmy and I don't foresee that being feasible in the near future. Same with personal profiles.
There should be a migrating feature for profiles IMO. Would really help with speed if the server is hosted near to you.
I agree. Even if it just means exporting your settings and subscriptions as a JSON and importing it elsewhere. Mastodon has a more "proper" migration feature that would work better for communities, but I'm not sure how well that'd scale to Lemmy which has much more posts per community than Mastodon will per user.