Cool feature and pretty much exactly what I was referencing, thanks for making me aware it exists.

This is why I’ve made the argument so many times that Lemmy needs ways to categorize stuff.

Let me present you with a situation that happened. I made a post in a patientgamers community. But since I know that community is niche, I cross post to both retro games and the general games community. This made some people upset because they had to see my post three times (understandable).

But if I don’t do this, the only slightly active sub community will benefit or see engagement. As evidenced by my last post that got somewhat less engagement.

What really should be the case is that cross posts don’t show up multiple times and by default the apps need to redirect to the actual cross posted post and not the comments on the cross post itself. They copied the awful cross posting behavior from Reddit and it sucks honestly. Until we are larger, we need better ways to post across multiple communities to keep them all active and boost collective interest.

Why are they not separated out in any way? There should be separate bins for “active posters” “active commenters” and “active voters”. Otherwise you’re going to get some wacky data problems like this.

I think account migration will have to come in two waves. It would be far easier to migrate accounts that are federated. That should be as simple as name swapping comments and posts and assigning them to the opposite servers while handing over user data.

The hard part is with servers who do not federate. Two solutions exist. One would have a data hop. It’s very likely that defederated servers would contain some link somewhere between federated servers. So the original server would pass data through one or two other servers to get to your new destination server that otherwise wouldn’t receive that data.

The other solution involves allowing a user to download their content with a key from the server and then present that to the new server. That data may need to be encrypted or have verification somehow to prevent tampering before reuploading it.

Any of these solutions will probably require manually approving and sorting through of data. The good news is that you can make requirements to say that users should have so many upvotes or whatever to receive a transfer to your platform. So their backup of data can sit still until you’re deemed worthy of transfer.

I’d say that data backups on your phone should definitely be an option regardless.

You also have to realize that Reddit would squash popular communities that weren’t as advertiser friendly. Which led to the larger (bad) communities.