Ask Lemmy
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This isn't regarding a user, but where a community is being hosted.
Are all major community members in Lemmys that are federated to where the community is being moved?
What happens to the community's data, since it won't get carried over?
What prevents this issue from happening again in a new instance?
For a platform that is meant to communicate, it seems funny that a lot of people's gut reactions to coordination problems is to cut all ties and leave.
Depends on where they move, doesn't it? Obviously if a community moves to hexbear then .world users won't be able to access it (and that's .world's fault). But there's no need to do that? They can just move to a federated instance and stay connected.
Does anything have to happen to that data? Why not just leave it behind as a record? I guess they could go through the effort of using a bot to repost everything in the new community if they wanted to preserve everything and not leave it on the old instance.
Pick a good instance and it won't happen.
.world was always shit, anyone could have seen this coming. It's always just been a reddit instance.
Again, the whole point of federation is that we don't cut all ties. It's not like moving communities requires defederating from .world
And that requires a lot of coordination, both with the user base to make sure the jump goes well for them and probably with the admins of the instance they are jumping to in order to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Up until a week ago, .world was acceptable. Then it wasn't. People change and communities change. Without an attempt to even discuss policy, this is going to become a major problem that keeps growing.
Why would one instance keep the data from a group of people that left and whose community is now locked? Or maybe the admins give mod privileges to a different set of mods and now you've got two competing groups.
A community is intentionally destroying itself to make a new one somewhere else. That's a larger impact than you are making it out to be.
That speaks more to a lack of community, doesn't it? If it's an actual community then it should be possible to get a message out to everyone that they're moving and make sure no one gets lost. If they can't coordinate without destroying themselves then I think this is a deeper problem that we need to address.
The signs were there. I think it is possible to understand who the admins are, what they believe, and what kind of community they are trying to build. The .world instance was always meant to be a reddit clone. That should have been a red flag.
This, too, speaks to a lack of community. How can you call it community if you don't even know who your admins are?
Fair. I guess my idea of using a bot to migrate all the content is the other option, but I don't know if a tool like that exists. This, along with the lack of true community, are things for us to think about for the future.
But why do through all that first before trying to talk to the admins?
The admins made their new policy very clear and people have already expressed their outrage about it. The discussion is kind of over.
Yeah, and the end result may be that a lot of subs leave. However, I would try other things first.
And I wouldn't. Federation is supposed to make it easy to migrate. That was the whole point.
I guess we just disagree about the purpose of federation.
Federation is as easy to migrate an email, but moving from one email account to another isn't seamless. There is even more of a sunken cost as the database is public facing and can't be move across instances like an email archive can be.
And the purpose of federation isn't the ability to switch accounts freely, it isn't built into the system. The purpose is like email, you can access multiple servers controlled by different groups from your own server controlled by people you've vetted.
But that's just it - when these different groups betray us we are enabled by federation to move to a different server. In this case, the admins failed the vetting process.
But who changes their email every year?
If your email service started doing shit you didn't like, such as forcing you to deal with spam email instead of blocking it, then you'd move to a different service.
But what if your email did shit like that every year? Or now you have to switch messaging with a group of friends and some don't want to jump to a certain new app?
Find an email service that doesn't do shit like that every year.
.world has always been bad, this isn't an example of "every single server is bad and they'll all do bad things every year and so you should just accept that the service will always be bad and always get worse." There are actually good servers. They exist.
The mod in question is a major Star Trek nerd and there was a massive falling out recently with the user base of startrek.website and the mods/admins, which is why a lot of them moved to .world in the first place.
This is why it's important to actually know who the admins are and what their goals are, rather than just picking instances based on vibes. Being a Star Trek nerd isn't actually a good reason to pick a Star Trek instance.
Outside of .ml and beehaw, what admins are that active and communicative with users in general? Who is publishing policy on how they are running their instance and showing how they are following through on it?
Most Lemmy instances are small hobbies run by vibes dictoral control of a single person and people change over time. Unless you build your own instance, admin relations will always be something that you have to deal with.
Maybe that's a problem?
But you've consistently stated that the first step if an admin tries to build that sort of thing and does something that you disagree with is to leave. Don't try to talk with the admins to help build a stable place, just leave.
I don't see that as a good first step.
If the admins first step isn't to talk to the community, then yeah, it's time to leave. They unilaterally made this decision and then forced it on to everyone. That's a bad sign!