no offense
Backend dev vs. frontend dev
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A UI designer’s dream is a backend engineer’s nightmare
Without knowing much about Lemmy I would guess that a bit more info is needed, along with some human interaction on both servers to validate the move.
When I signed up i wrote a bit about why I chose that server, I think that as a minimum would also be required.
Edit: I would also only allow moving between servers at the 1st of each month, just to cut down on work for the admins.
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There’s three big problems with this.
A. You’re now allowing people to hop, and even name change. Let’s say they’ll allow that. But I think both of those are things that will have to be agreed upon if it’s done at all.
B. You’re missing the password. Every instance should have a unique salt, passwords should NEVER be reversible, and never be stored insecurely (AKA before salting the hash for instance). I use a different password for every site, but I’ve had sites tell me “Your password is X” … holy shit that’s a HUGE security flaw for multiple reasons.
So if I’m migrating and don’t need to set a new password, that’d be questionable.
C. This can be done unscrupulously. If I get control of someone’s account, I can migrate it and essentially steal all their accounts and posts. For 99 percent of us who cares, but let’s say there’s a post from “Justin Bieber” and I get his account, migrate it, use a new password, and now make his posts say “I don’t suck cocks”…
It’s probably more important when it’s a big game studio who posts update and such to Lemmy somewhere but the point is accounts will have a huge value eventually, letting you migrate it with a click might be dangerous.
I discovered this a couple of days ago: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim. It just transfers your subscriptions to your new account in another instance. I don’t really mind not being able to transfer comments for now, but this has been very very helpful when I moved my subscriptions from one of my lemmy.world accounts to another instance because of the recent downtimes.
Yea this is what should be aimed for in the middle term. Anything bigger involves a number of technical chalenges.
But being able to migrate your “setup” to another instance is the middle ground that will actually doable in the short term and a rather significant improvement in the user experience.
“Setup” would include subscriptions, and any further details about subscriptions that may come along like user defined multi-subscriptions etc, settings, cakeday (suggested elsewhere in the comments and a wonderfully human suggestion), blocks etc.
They might just go Masto-style migration and just but a banner on your profile linking to your new account, and give you a list of communities to import.
@cheerjoy I think in the long-run of the Fediverse it would be better if we can fully export all of our data to a new instance sure maybe still have a redirect account on the original instance you where using but it would be good for not only people that want to move instance to another popular instance but also if someone creates there own allowing you to try out the Fediverse before spending the time running your own instance as apart of it.
I think migration should just do all of the non-public stuff, like subscribed+blocked communities and saved posts
An alternative idea to allow a user to be apart of multiple instances simultaneously: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3416
please do it
So would it delete the original account or copy ? I think this could be done with a client app
I think UI is the least of their worries. They’ve not even decided what to migrate yet.
It really needs to be everything - posts, comments, subscriptions, upvotes/downvotes, blocks, and mod status. It needs to be such that signing in to your account on the new instance is the same as signing into on the old one. It should be so seamless that you can just switch instances just to try out a new one and switch back again if it isn’t for you.
It won’t be anything even close.
Indexes are unique to each instance. Post ID, Comment ID, Vote ID. There’s no way to correlate this information between two instances other than to do a full text match, post by post, comment by comment, vote by vote, to determine if what is being imported already exists on the new instance or is “new”.
Even if you go that route, then there’s the quandaries that follow… if you import what is effectively a “new” post to your new instance, do the comments (which aren’t yours) come along, or do you simply end up importing your post with no interaction history.
Then there is identity. You most likely have a non-local identity on your new server, as a result of federation, how does the new instance know that you are who you say you are, givimg you ownership of any of that existing content as it binds it to your, now, local identity?
That’s just off the top of my head.
If you’re lucky you’ll get to keep your cake day.
Indexes are unique to each instance. Post ID, Comment ID, Vote ID. There’s no way to correlate this information between two instances other than to do a full text match, post by post, comment by comment
I hope there will be a solution for this. It’s so unpractical. The only sane way to link to posts on other instances seems to be to cross-post them.
If you just share a link to a specific post or comment … people can see it, but unless they happen to have an account on that instance, they cannot interact with it. To do so, you have to search for it, and the search is not reliable.
Why can’t post or comment IDs be generated hashes, and each instance uses the same algorithm?
Someone else did bring up the point that the canonical URL is stored, so that does make correlation a bit easier.
Doesn’t solve the concerns you’ve brought forth. For example, the “I don’t have an account here”. A local instance can correlate a local post to a remote post, being able to provide a “open on original instance” link but it can’t be done the opposite direction, which would relieve this problem.
As for hashing, it too certain what that would gain but at some point there was obviously a decision not to correlate by the message UUID (which would accomplish the same thing). Since I wasn’t in the room can’t say why.
As long as they’re using UUIDs where they should be the possibility of a collision is literally so low as to be impossible, but that relies on all the pieces of software using good principles.
Message activity contains a UUID but the activity table is considered disposable and is purged regularly. Once the message is broken down into its parts and stored the universal identifier is lost. All correlation is local.
It’s not that on mastodon and it shouldn’t be that here either. There needs to be some consequence to switching instance.
No there shouldn’t be a consequence. However, most of this is related to server-load.
I’m not convinced that this is a problem that needs to be solved. The value of the federation is that your data is fleeting and not guaranteed. I’m not sure why anyone in the federation needs to guarantee the existence of your data long term.
Because people form attachments to their accounts, and allowing them to keep their info can promote federation (encourage people to use other instances, especially since most people start off on one of the big instances).
I get what you’re saying, but I think there is a practical purpose for allowing migration. That being said, I think working on the UI before thinking about how migration would work in practice might be putting the cart before the horse
Oh idk, maybe people actually like to use online services without interruptions? I’ve already had to recreate my lemmy account twice! (vlemmy.net and lemmy.fmhy.ml both went down)
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