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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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.
Risky. Some hacker exploits a vulnerability, takes over the community and migrates it to some other server… then what?
Also, if a community leaves a specific server, what stops anyone else from re-creating it in the original server?
To the first, rollback.
To the second, is that a problem?
To the first, rollback.
for the first, you still have everyone subbed to the newly created community made by the attacker and all the links are still updated
if instead of migrating everything right away, you have the original server of the community give redirects for each request, then that won’t help if the original server is closing down, but it’s probably the only right way to do it, I guess you could also have an angry instance admin disable the redirect to keep the community on their own server
To the second, is that a problem?
migrating and then recreating the original is actually an issue that Github has when you rename a repo, Github will give redirects for the links to the old name of the repo, but if you create another repo with the old name then the redirects are no longer served and if someone clicks on an old link then they end up at the repo that stole the name instead of the repo that was renamed
so if let’s say there was an official linus_tech_tips community on beehaw and they moved to lemmy.world, some random person could create the community again on beehaw after the migration to appear official and hijack all the old links out on the internet
you fix that by keeping the old name reserved after migration, I don’t really think that’s a big problem in this case
I actually liked @Neato@kbin.social’s idea, instead of “migrating”, you just copy the community and then send a message to every subscriber, close the original community, and put a pinned post at the top, maybe a message in the sidebar too
🥱
Bro, this kind of comment is exactly why I left digg back in the day.
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 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.
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!
Additionally, if your server disappears *cough* VLemmy *cough* you should be able to load a backup from somewhere and register your channels on another server. I realize this is still a crawl-walk-run scenario and that’s going to be far in the future. But we can still hope for it.
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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.
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.
Yep, I lost my communities when vlemmy shut down
Agreed!
Absolutely. I don’t think we really have fediverse until we get this.
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.
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.
That would be a great feature.
