Moving a Lemmy community to PieFed
peertube.wtf
A quick demo of the process of moving a community between instances.

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:

  1. 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.

  2. Lock the old community to by setting it to ‘moderators only’ so no one else can post in it.

  3. Create a post in the old community announcing the impending move to piefed.social. Paste the url of that post into the field below.

  4. Submit the ‘move community’ form (there is a link in the sidebar of every remote community) to send the request to piefed.social admins.

  5. piefed.social admins will review your request, turn this community into a local one and contact you.

  6. Update your announcement post in the old community to encourage people to join the new community at
    !whatever@piefed.social.

  • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
    0·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Rimu@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      0·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • Tuukka R@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        You comment was written closer to a year ago, and much water has flown in the Vantaa after that, but… Wouldn’t it be already possible to enable pulling group members who are on PieFed instances? Either including asking for a permission or without asking, as seen fit.

        That would of course be only a small fraction of most groups’ users, but definitely better than nothing! It might also semi-accidentally create a standard that other platforms might implement as well.

        • Rimu@piefed.socialOPEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          Group members are not listed publicly or available over ActivityPub - the only server that knows who all the group members are is the one hosting the community. All other instances only know about their local users and which groups they’re in.

          The solution I’m leaning towards is to federate a Move activity to all instances and have those instances change their local users to be a part of the new community instead. This will only work for PieFed instances as Lemmy does not understand ‘Move’.

  • BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de
    0·
    11 months ago

    So what exactly does that do AP wise? Does it send out a MOVE activitiy of any kind? Do other instances get an activity by which they can tell that the community has moved and can they confirm that the new instance has the authority, so the permission, to move it from the old instance?

    • Rimu@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Currently, there is no AP. But yes the real solution to this, where all the followers from all instances end up shifting themselves to the new community, would involve the federation of Move activity, somehow.

      As you allude to, doing this with the right authority & permission is tricky. But as long as the Move is in an Announce that is signed by the origin community, that can be accepted by others as legitimate. The origin community knows the instances where all the followers are located.

      So the process would have to be initiated by a mod on the origin instance.

      Also the destination instance would need to have created a community on their end first, before all the other instances start asking for the AP representation. So probably a Move would need to go there first, then wait for an Accept to come back before federating the Move to all other instances.