- 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:
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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.
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Lock the old community to by setting it to ‘moderators only’ so no one else can post in it.
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Create a post in the old community announcing the impending move to piefed.social. Paste the url of that post into the field below.
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Submit the ‘move community’ form (there is a link in the sidebar of every remote community) to send the request to piefed.social admins.
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piefed.social admins will review your request, turn this community into a local one and contact you.
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Update your announcement post in the old community to encourage people to join the new community at
[email protected].
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If I understand correctly, Lemmy users are currently not able to see the migrated posts.
Question: If someone replies to a Lemmy user’s post or comment which was migrated, will that Lemmy user be notified?
Example: I left a comment under this post back when it was on [email protected]. I can’t currently see the piefed copy of my comment (or that post) on my home instance. What happens when someone replies to it?
If shows up as a comment on [email protected]
It does show up as a comment in https://piefed.social/c/internetisbeautiful, but not on https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected].
I posted a test reply from my PieFed account, but never received a reply notification on my sh.itjust.works account.
If the original posters never see new replies, are there sufficient advantages to warrant leaving the comment sections open?
It feels similar (though not identical) to projects mirroring posts and comments from Reddit. Sure, the content is there, but the people aren’t.
Might it be better to lock all of the threads upon migration, essentially preserving a “read-only” archive?
Yes, good idea!
Wow, thanks for considering my suggestion! Do you have any estimate on when it might be implemented?
No, I’m still looking into it. It may be possible to make Lemmy able to see migrated posts. I did some experiments but it could be a dead end.
It may be possible to make Lemmy able to see migrated posts
Ooh, that would be even better! Is there anywhere I can follow progress on this?
Yes it’s pretty janky.
But it’s better than losing the content entirely :)
Agreed
It’s a cool feature, though as long as it’s Piefed-to-Piefed only it’s kind of of limited use. It also doesn’t transfer over subscriptions right? That’s still the biggest problem with community migration in my opinion.
It doesn’t do subscriptions. That would need to be initiated on the old community and currently all the old communities are on Lemmy instances, so that’s a non-starter.
Could it be possible at some point in the future? Once we’ll have more Piefed instances people might want to move a few communities from one to another
Yes, for sure. I think the old community would
AnnounceaMoveactivity to all followers, which would cause all the other instances to update their Follows to point to the new community.
