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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 disagree. If one is that important, I say those mods need to create their own instance.
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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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But that also makes it incredibly easy for communities on defederated servers to set up shop elsewhere.
And those communities may be the sole reason that the server was defederated in the first place.
I think a possible outcome is that the larger instances would have to put a stop to open creation of new communities, to prevent toxic groups from setting up shop and moving all their objectionable content and users into the space.
What if an instance were able to block specific communities on other instances without defederating?
Users can already do so, what would instance-level block bring?
Allow the admins of the instance to enforce their rules?
Say you have an instance with a “no-NSFW” rule, for people who don’t want to randomly come across NSFW communities. Their admins could take care of the curating of rule-breaking NSFW communities without having to resort to defederating from the entire instance. This doesn’t have to be an outright block but just a filter that could prevent the community to show up in “All”.
This seems silly. Just have new users default to having the “don’t show NSFW” setting enabled.
He’s one of the “I don’t want to see something so neither should anyone else” crowd.
Incorrect. I’m fine with instances that host a variety of content. Including stuff I don’t want to see.
However, I’m allowed to join an instance whose admins take a stance against bigotry for example, and therefore take better care that such content isn’t allowed to freely go through their instance. That way I and a thousand of other users don’t need to all block the content they don’t like manually. It’s my instance admin’s choice, and my choice to go with their instance.
That will break federation in a very bad way. Imagine you’re on such instance which doesn’t want NSFW content, but you subscribe to a NSFW community. Admins block it and you don’t even know it, you just don’t see your community anymore. What do you do? Create another account elsewhere? The whole point of federation is to use one single account EVERYWHERE. Otherwise it’s no different then Reddit and Hacker News - just two random online sites and you have to create a bazillion of accounts everywhere.
Admins should not block anything coming from outside instances. Admins should never defed. Instead you, as a user, should have all the tools to moderate your own feed. If you give away your rights and freedoms, you’ll lose them forever and you’ll be abused on Lemmy the way you were on Reddit.
then the question is why the hell did you make an account on an instance that doesn’t want to interact with NSFW content (presumably it’s in their rules) when you want to interact with NSFW content; like I don’t see why you’d do that if you knew the rules beforehand
Do you understand what the point of federation is? The point is to have one single account to interact with the whole Fediverse. It shouldn’t matter where you register your account, all Fediverse should be accessible to you.
that’s not the point; the point is to not have a single group dominate the site and to make it easier to avoid bad actors (bigots + fascists, because there’s a lot of that online) by just blocking the instance they live on
the “one single account” thing is a bonus, but definitely not the main reason for federation