OpenStars

Because it illustrates the underlying issue: who owns the community, who gets to decide what happens to it, who gets to decide whether each individual user gets to use it, or to be moved elsewhere to a different instance entirely that they may know nothing about?

I am saying that the choice should be at the level of the individual users - as in democratic. Example implementations may include a pop-up box appearing, notifying users that the community has moved and asking (requiring consent!) if the user would like to subscribe to the new one?

Currently it belongs to the mods, as too happened on Reddit, and to the admins. Lemmy is extremely authoritarian in nature btw, even more so than Reddit, e.g. Reddit does all of: (1) notifying users of a moderation event (e.g. post/comment removal) while Lemmy users in contrast may never find out that anything ever happened to their content; (2) providing a means of appeal or at least communication with the people responsible for that removal, chiefly the modmail but also similar means to contact admins; (3) in lieu of a modmail, people on Lemmy used to DM the mod who was reported by the modlog, however a long time ago now that was changed and now the modlog can simply say that it was done by a "mod".

Users have little enough control over what happens to their content as it stands now. And as the 196 situation reveals, and the Rexodus likewise did long before that, people do not enjoy that feeling.

Your way, if you have a great and responsible set of mods and admins, would work great, just like a kingdom or dictatorship - very effective, very efficient, but with little to zero control over what happens to someone below the authority at the top. i.e. once you make a post to a community or subscribe to it, you automatically get ported over to the new place like a commodity that the owner decides to shift around as they please. If I am understanding you correctly, you wouldn't even ask the user? I don't mean in a nefarious way! It is totally "for their convenience", of course... and it genuinely would work that way, if the mods and admins in question are trustworthy. But that is not always the case.

But the trustworthiness of the mods is not the strongest point imho, and rather it is the question of who owns their own personal accounts, who gets to decide what communities someone subscribes to or not? Are followers the property of the celebrity being followed, or of the follower? Systems that aid in migration - e.g. a pop-up box with a question asking for consent - are one thing, but systems that attempt to force migration cross a line that should not be crossed, imho.

You should (they however, did not🤪)

I also don't see what is immediately potentially corrupt about moving instance in a way that would inherently annoy the audience.

Read more about the attempted forcible migration attempt, against the wishes of the community members, here:

Let's just move a whole community to a new instance without asking!

196 on blahaj tried that forcibly once, it did not go well for them.

Let's just move a whole community to a new instance without asking!

It just seems like you are placing a LOT of trust in community mods to make decisions on behalf of the community for its own well-being rather than to feed their egotistical desires. However, I am recalling the semi-recent controversy of the 196 mods attempting to forcibly move their community from blahaj to Lemmy.world and people got insanely angry and started a whole new 196 (again, which is how 196 had moved to blahaj in the first place).

A lot of people came here from Reddit to get away from such practices, not subject themselves to an army of little fiefdoms within which each mod is in control of their own community. If Reddit was an empire, then your model sounds like a peaceful, hopefully loving (sometimes, but... perhaps not always?) kingdom, whereas I am talking about a democracy where the individual people who submit their content get to control their individual futures, even if their past submissions are carved in stone and their own control over it mostly released.

It's something to think about anyway!:-)

I don't think I have ever felt this seen. 😁

Upvoting bc relevance but I somewhat disagree. Many people left Reddit not just bc of ads or poor treatment of app devs but bc of issues regarding "ownership" of a record. If I say something, can Reddit train AI off of it, or make money off of it, without my consent (using Reddit automatically assumes consent, even retroactively).

So applying that same thinking process here, does anyone - not just Rimu but anyone - have the right to simply steal community content wholesale? And who would provide consent - just the current community mods? The past ones? Why wouldn't the commentors have the right to do or not do what they wish with their own comments? Setting aside how difficult it would be to even implement such a thing - like if someone agrees to migrate their comment, but they were replying to someone else, and included a quote from them, then is consent automatically granted for those words?

It is a tricky subject. Perhaps importing the content in read-only mode is the best that could be hoped for, preserving a historical snapshot bc it is too difficult to import something wholesale, especially if not merely every provider of posts but also every single person that ever commented in a community may not have an account on the recipient server - like even if they have a PieFed one would it need to be on the precise exact instance as where the content is being migrated to?

And even more relevant, what if the recipient instance has different rules than the original? Like defederations? Rules about niceness or illegality of stuff (see e.g. Lemmy.world's whole deal with piracy community). Importing an entire community and keeping it all "live" while simultaneously offering pass-through connections from the old to the new seems fraut with such difficulties. Might it not be better to make a hard break from the old, allowing a fresh start on the new? i.e. community migration is just a convenience feature, it was never meant to do all the things that you said.

Tbh I don't have anything to do with PieFed's codebase or policies or anything at all - I am just a user like you, sharing my unqualified opinion here:-). I hope it is useful to see this pushback against implementing what I interpreted your words to mean though.

Thank you for your kind words:-)

This comment should win Lemmy for the day:-).

I am so confused. A "sub" used to refer, on the old place, as a "sub-reddit", but we do not have those here. Did you mean "community"?

(And as already covered, PieFed already has an implementation of this, so what is the "future" referring to there in that case?)

Perhaps I am... and perhaps you are too, and is that even wrong/bad, to have opinions about what we like or do not?

The world is as it is, not as we wish it. That said, power comes from realizing that and turning it to your advantage. I wanted to gently push you to consider that, but I may have come on too strong myself. Don't let me ruin your day!

(The latter is anecdotal, as I have not looked myself but hear it often from others who have)