- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
When a community needs to move to another instance, it can be a rocky process.
It doesn’t need to be, though - as long as someone on your instance has been a part of the community for a while your instance will already have quite a lot of the content from the old community. All we need to do is change our record of which instance the community belongs to and that’s what PieFed’s new ‘Move community’ feature does. Check out the video for a quick demo.
The full process is:
-
Ensure the copy of the community on this instance has been active long enough to receive a decent amount of posts. The move process will not copy posts so having an account on this instance subscribed to it for a while is the only way to get old posts here.
-
Lock the old community to by setting it to ‘moderators only’ so no one else can post in it.
-
Create a post in the old community announcing the impending move to piefed.social. Paste the url of that post into the field below.
-
Submit the ‘move community’ form (there is a link in the sidebar of every remote community) to send the request to piefed.social admins.
-
piefed.social admins will review your request, turn this community into a local one and contact you.
-
Update your announcement post in the old community to encourage people to join the new community at
[email protected].
Maybe we could do something similar to how communities work, with !. e.g. [email protected] becomes clickable and every instance knows how to resolve it to https://theirinstance.tld/c/[email protected]…
!comment/[email protected]
but to avoid legacy fediverse apps from being confused we’d want to change ! to ~ instead…
You could ask @[email protected] or check the parser used in Mbin. Over here, remote comment/thread links are silently rewritten to point to the local instance equivalent if it exists. This makes it super easy for users, since they don’t need to learn any special syntax, they just send links directly and let the remote instance handle the translation.
This works even when people don’t “know” they’re doing it, e.g. Blaze’s link above points to the fedia.io version of that comment for me (
https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/2069019/Moving-communities-between-instances/comment/10324146), even though that’s not the link he sent.I like that better!
Well the code is just not that intersting. It just replaces links which are known ActiityPub Ids with inline previews of that content. Main drawback is of course that your instance has to know about this content in order to render any previews for it…