sure you can just make a new one, but all of your old posts and comments won’t show up. Not to mention your DMs too
it seems kinda counterproductive to the goal of lemmy being federation where you can just move to another instance if yours gets bought by Elon or an admin goes corrupt, but it’s not made simple to do that.
I’ve seen many people be on lemmy.ml that would switch but they’ve been using it since the start of lemmy and they don’t wanna restart
I know mastodon has a little “hey this user has moved to @user@newinstance” popup but that’s not really that elegant either
How do you transfer email accounts?
Easiest way is to use IMAP connections - assuming you use IMAP normally to store email on the server (as almost everyone does these days - very few use POP3 to download them and remove from the server).
There’s a few little utilities or even websites (last I checked) that can assist in the process. Some try to charge money.
If you have access to Linux (or WSL on Windows), you can find ways to do it for free from a terminal window.
But even then, that’s just you moving data. You aren’t changing old emails to have them reply to your new email and you aren’t auto-updating how the rest of the world interacts with you.
Yes. Literally answering a question.
Extrapolating that out to why a transfer of accounts in the Fediverse isn’t a thing using email as an example, the only thing that would get transferred is personal account information. Maybe that includes some private direct messages for archival use and a list of followed communities, but I doubt that the value of moving accounts for most users is in the holding of archived data. I can see why the devs would consider this low priority.