Given that Lemmy currently has no native support for migrating communities if an instance shuts down or becomes unstable, I’ve been wondering:
Has anyone thought about creating a bot that helps with this process?
The basic idea: when a migration is needed, one or more mods could create a new community on the target instance (setting up rules, banner, header, etc.), and then the bot would clone the old community’s content — posts, comments, etc. — and repost them to the new community (all with the community’s support, ideally preserving authorship, or noting who posted what).
To be respectful of users, there could even be an option to exclude posts/comments from users who don’t want to be included in the migration.
This kind of tool could dramatically reduce the time and effort needed to manually recreate communities and save valuable content from being lost.
I’d love to attempt this myself, but unfortunately I lack the time, technical know-how, and energy.
Has anything like this already been attempted, or is anyone working on a tool like this?
Curious to hear your thoughts — feasibility, technical hurdles, privacy concerns, etc.
This would be better implemented as a function in Lemmy itself. A bot shouldn’t have the level of access necessary to do this.
We don’t have the capacity to implement all the features users ask for, at least not without additional contributors or waiting a long time. So it’s better to implement it as a bot.
The cleanest solution seems to be the one described in my previous comment, so you get an archived community with all the original content, correct usernames etc. And make a new community for new posts. Or have the bot create new posts and comments with the same content, and credit the author in markdown body. But that seems like a worse solution in many ways.
Numatic shared the code you’d need to do most of this in another thread. So it should not be that hard to implement it in lemmy proper.
Maybe that could be a next step for the new project Bounce? https://lemmy.ca/post/45530189
If there’s a new party willing to take over administration of the entire instance as-is, why not just transfer ownership of the original server?
Better proposal: portable objects.
It says that the link is invalid
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md
You can also search “fep-ef61”
I’ve thought about how to implement it in Lemmy, but as @iso@lemy.lol said, DIDs simplify the whole process.
